DVD's Have Stopped Playing On My Computer????

Hello All. I do hope I'm in the right forum.

I have a Sony DVD RW DW-U14A (DVD/CD-ROM). It has never given me any problems in the past until recently. When I insert DVD movies into the drive, the door closes and a orange light comes on steady for about a minute then shuts off. It doesn't even sound as if the DVD is spinning.
When I open Power DVD and select play an information box comes up saying, "No disc in drive E:"

I have tried this on several DVD's with no luck. It works just fine with:
-Archiving family photos onto CD
-Playing my daughters PC games
-Playing and burning audio CD's

My system is running MS Windows XP Professional, Version 2002, Service Pack 2
The computer is Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.80GHz 2.79 GHz, 512 MB of RAM

I dont know if this extra info helps, but under Sony DVD RW DW-U14A Properties - Driver

Driver Provider: Mircosoft
Driver Date: 7/1/2001
Driver Version: 5.1.2535.0
Digital Signer: Mirosoft Windows Publisher

If you require any more info, please just ask. I really hope its just as simple as resetting something.

Thanks in advance,
Global

 

Anyone out there have any suggestions? Am I in the wrong forum? Any other websites or forums I should try?

Thanks again,
Global

 

Your drive could be dirty and you could try cleaning it.

 

Use a cleaning cd which you can get at an electronics store.

 

I'll give that a try. Thanks Tourangh

Cheers,
Global

 

Hi,

I had a problem with my Piodata drive when it stopped recognising DVDs and thought they were CDs.

Dont know if this could be related. What i did was to flash the bios / firmware of the drive and this seemed to work.

Not sure if this is any help but it might be.

 

Forgive me, but I'm not quite computer savy.
What is "flash the bios / firmware of the drive"?

Is this dangerous?

Does anyone know where I could find a site where I could download the driver software? I do not have the disc to try and reinstall it.

Thanks in advance,
Global

 

Hi,

Firmware is the electronic heart of a receiver, where coded instructions relating to receiver function, and sometimes data processing algorithms, are embedded as integral portions of the internal circuitry.

Might not make that much sense. Its basically the prgramming inside the drive that handles all the instructions etc.

It can be a bit dodgy so you might want to read up about it. I found this discaussion on another forum that might help

http://forum.rpc1.org/viewtopic.php?t=18382&highlight=sony+dwu14a

Its about flashing a drive from the model you have to one above, this may not solve the problem but it might worth a try. this is the link to the files

http://isweb44.infoseek.co.jp/computer/type-ive/files/14A_to_510A [1.0c].zip