Lite-on dvd/cd issues

been over a week now, and for the life of me I cant figure out why my lite-on combo drive wont work.. seems many people(googled) have the same problem, bu no fixes for it .
Its brand new , it reads xp pro just fine, but nothing else. It even says that it CAN'T read dvd's only cds, but it wont read anything but xp pro. what the heck? Anyone know, or have the same prob? I have a few games I would love to play, not to mention my mobo cd for set up.
signed....
Abnout to lose it!
hehe

 

How does the drive behave when a CD is inserted? Does the CD spin up? Does the light start blinking?

You can try reinstalling the drive. Open the device manager, select your drive and uninstall it. Reboot. Windows should reinstall it now.
Report if this solved the problem.

 

ok, I have done that a hundred times hoping for the best.
I HAVE uninstalled, and booted.
I have done a firmware flash
I have also swapped IDE ports back and forth (primary, Secondary) Note: This used to work, not any more. Seems My xp disk doesnt work either.
I sometimes get the 0xc0000006 error, but not today.
I know its software related because too many people get this same prob.
Is there a possible reg fix?
I just dont know.
specs are :
Asus a8n-sli deluxe Mobo
AMD 3500+ w/ 512 3200 ddr ram
NVidia 256 dual 400 fs
maxtor 160 gig SATA

 

Also I have scanned with spybot, and addaware.
scanned w/ Avast. Ran CCleaner, regseeker, and xp scan disk.
no probs.
Possibly a helper. my pc thinks it is a cd player, not a dvd

 

Hello MajorGeeks...
Can no one help?
oh MY!

 

Does your BIOS recognize the drive properly? If it doesn't, Windows likely won't either. On the BIOS main screen, you should see the drive listed by name and type. If it's listed there OK, highlight it and hit Enter to go to it's proterties page, and make sure transfer is UDMA, not the older PIO mode. This should be set automatically, although you can force manual settings.

Obviously, make sure the drive's jumper is set properly to Master/Slave, or to Cable Select. If there's another drive on that cable, both must be set either Master and Slave, or both set to Cable Select to work.

If the BIOS doesn't recognize the drive properly, are you using the latest BIOS version? For that board it should be 1016.

If the BIOS is latest, and drive jumpers are set right, you might try using a different cable. Defective cables aren't common, but they do pop up occasionally.

 

A bit more. The older PIO transfer mode was fast enough for CDs, but is not fast enough for DVDs. So if you're in PIO mode, either because of BIOS not enabling UDMA, or Windows being set to PIO mode, you won't read DVDs.

Are you sure you're using a newer 80 wire UDMA capable cable? The older 40 wire versions won't support UDMA.

If UDMA is enabled in BIOS, check your IDE/ATA/ATAPI controllers in Windows Device Manager, and make sure UDMA is enabled there for your optical drive. If Windows has trouble reading a disk, it may switch you from UDMA to the older PIO mode automatically. Plus, some game installs glitch with some drives, and some game makers recommend switching to PIO mode to solve the problem. If you've done that, you won't read DVDs on that channel. (I hate game makers that suggest that). If so, you can uncheck the box that lets Windows set the transfer mode, and set it manually... but make SURE you know what mode your drive will handle. Or you can uninstall the IDE driver and re-install, but since your board uses nVIDIA drivers, you may need to re-install the nVIDIA drivers to get it back properly.

 

About the wires, I am using the ones that came with mobo. I checked bios, everything is in order.
It is wierd that I can explore the contentents of cd's or dvd's but can't run anything without the error message.. D:\ is not a valid win32 application. I used to get other errors but now they are gone, just the one mentioned above. also I set the region to 1 if that matters. um...Could it be a problem with non digitaly signed drivers? Unfortunatly I dont have more wires, but they look fine, no rips or tears, or visual problems...still shiney and new. like i say I can see the contentes of the roms, just cant run them.
this is wierd!
let me k now if I can tell you somthing else, and thanks for the help.

 

well I'll be damned. when I put my machine together, I used the cd rom IDE cable. I just threw in the HDD IDE cable and now its working. Thanks GT for the 80 wire idea. Hows one to know that? hehe
I wish I could reply to all the others with this problem, I bet its the same thing.
Thanks again, you saved a perfectly good combo drive from taking flying lessons!

 

There was some discussion of it back when UDMA first came out, but not much recently. Since the connectors are the same 40 pin, and squinting at the cable to see if there are 40 or 80 strands is difficult, they came out with color coding standards for the newer 80 wire cables.

* Blue: The blue connector attaches to the host (motherboard or controller).
* Gray: The gray connector is in the middle of the cable, and goes to any slave (device 1) drive if present on the channel.
* Black: The black connector is at the opposite end from the host connector and goes to the master drive (device 0), or a single drive if only one is used.

Most of the old 40 wire cables used all black connectors.

Glad you found your problem.

 

isee that now, thanks again