DVD-RW and CD-RW just wont work

Hi all

after spending the entire day on this I thought it might be time for better minds. On a recent rebuild the the Pioneer DVD-RW set as primary and jumper in correct location and the Lite-on CD-RW set as slave on a double IDe cable to one controller on MB just wont work. I can detect them in device manager through Win 7 and they state they are working properly. I've tried updating the drivers and they too are correct. Under my computer the drives again show up. If you right click on them for properties the computer will freeze. Doubing clicking produces some activity at the hardware but nothing plays. On Bios setup they again are recognized. They are set to auto. I set them to "none" which is the only other option and it made no difference. I have swapped out cables to no avail. I have tried running each one on it's own single cable to no avail. I'm stumped. The machine recognizes both drives but they just wont run. The drivers are there and up to date. They get power and spin up briefly but then nothing plays. Is there another way to access them as i'm not to familiar with windows 7?????

 

Did you try with just one drive yet?

 

And, have you tried booting to a disk with either drive?

 

Yes it will boot to the CD from bios and will ask if I want to boot from CD which I ignore and let it go to HD. And yes I tried just one drive on a single cable with the jumper moved to auto. I've also uninstalled and reinstalled them from device manager. Nothing makes a difference.

What brought me to this point was that my processor crashed several months ago and in that trouble shooting process I bought a new MB a S serious Gigabyte and a new processor. So the MB has changed? Could this MB just not get along with either of these devices?

 

I guess that's possible, but doesn't seem likely.

I'm assuming that in the old setup, Win 7 was also used? If so, it's not an operating system compatibility issue.

 

Yes it was windows seven. In fact it's the same harddrive. Now a friend of mine tells me I should have re-installed windows on the hardrive because the new MB needed to talk to it some how and make changes. If so I'm guilty of just swapping out the MB and processor and using the same HD with that currently installed OS win 7. Is he right or it shouldn't make a difference? I still have the old MB. Or I can try and do a re install of OS repair so I don't lose my data. Or do I bite the bullet and do a clean install and suffer the consequences of losing stuff? I much preffered the old days of DOS.

 

Some ribbon cables are wired for master/slave config. As I remember the last connection is master, but I could be wrong. Another configuration is "cabler select" either by jumper or software.

Another thought is the possibility of IDE as opposed to Enhanced IDE (EIDE), which can be big. IDE drives and EIDE drives do not mix. Most drives are either/or, but some are not.

Another thought is that your faster drive should be the slave drive. The slave drive will set the speed, and the master will go no faster than the slave.

 

Is there a way for you to test them in another machine to make sure that they aren't indeed failing?

 

You might want to try here. Some people have reported that it fixed their dvd/cd issues.

http://support.microsoft.com/gp/cd_dvd_drive_problems

 

Hi All,

Most cables, especially 80 wire, are wired for both Master/Slave and Cable Select. With Master/Slave it makes no difference which connector is where including the one to the Mother Board. With CS the "Master" is on the end connector and the "Slave" is on the middle connector. Both Drives must be set to CS. The terms Master and Slave are confusing in these cases. Hope this helps someone.

Good Luck, Jim

 

For complete clarity, the essence of your problem is that although the optical drives are correctly detected in Device Manager, if you insert any kind of media into the drives, nothing happens. Correct?

In the 1st instance and just to completely rule out optical failure, I would boot from a Linux Live cd and just make sure that both are detected and work as they should.

Puppy is a good choice (small 100mb download, runs completely in ram) plus the HD and optical icons will be on the Puppy Linux desktop.

MS have a utility to correct this AutoFix.exe which works for XP (and helped me many times), not sure if they have produced one for Win7. Have a look.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...b6-e8fa-45c4-a171-1b389cfacdad&displaylang=en

On another note, if you just transplanted the mobo with win7 to another board, I think therein lies the cause of your problem. Usually, when transplanting mobos, I remove the chipset drivers/change to windows default ones and after the transplant, I re-install new chipset drivers which 9.5 times out of 10 works without issues.

Good Luck

PS. also as has been mentioned before, make sure that the devices are correctly jumpered, one master one slave (I steer away from CS now as it has always caused me problems) and also make sure that the master is connected to the end.

 

I'm still wondering if it could be something simple like the jumper settings being wrong?

Are you taking the jumper positions for each drive off the actual markings on the drive? Different brands (which you have) may have different positions so you want to set the jumper according to the markings on each drive.

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I haven't seen optical drives which have "auto" as an option. It is usually "CS" for cable select.
Regardless, I would try one optical drive set to Master according to the markings found on the drive. Leave the other one disconnected (not on data cable) for now. Make sure settings are on Auto in BIOS. Start Windows and see if you can at least select Properties of the drive without a freeze.

 

I'm of the opinion that i made a big mistake by not reloading the operating system and as was mentioned therin lies the problem.The Cd works just fine with the windows OS disk booting. I stopped short of doing the repair as I'm not very comfortable in transfering files and backing up. Opinions on just going ahead with the repair option and how likely is it to totally screw up my machine?

 

Oh and I'm using the jumper settings directly off the drives. Besides i've tried isolating each drive. The quick fix link above came back as nothing wrong found with my drives. I'm lucky that the same chipset is even running everything else with minor problems. Problem is Microsoft says if you change MB you change machines and that constitutes buying another copy of their OS.

 

I agree: a repair install might very well clear this up.
Fred Langa has published an easy to follow non-destructive XP rebuild routine - walk through it, see what you think, and don't be afraid to ask questions here.