Dvd drive problems

[bolo1957]

Help needed please I have a dell studio w7 laptop .The dvd drive stopped working, icon still on my computer but when i click on it ejects disc. I then used a external dvd hp940d this was ok at first then went the same way .then i obtained another external dvd hp1040d and again ok for a while then went same way. I have tried a non windows boot disc and a system restore also followed a guide and deleted lowercase in regedit all to no avail , surely it cant be that all have packed in so close to each other and is somthing technical .any help would be most appreciated

[Mickha]

You can try them on another laptop/PC to see if they're faulty.
Have you checked in device manager to see if they are recognized?

When you state that they were working for a while how long was this?

I assume you have tried uninstalling, and re-installing the drivers but have you tried deleting the DVD drives, from Device Manager, then allowing Windows to locate, and install the drivers?

Have you checked the HP website for any firmware updates, for the DVD writers?

[nibblitz]

Have you got a system restore point of when it was all working ok that you can go back to?

oops, just read you post again, you said you tried a restore... ok.. ummm.. Lets recap, your internal drive went funny (your fault description isnt too clear) so you tried an external USB drive, that too went funny, then you restored the system, problem remains... Thats two seperate bit of hardware independent of eachother failing, one fault with an internal drive, and one with an external drive, and these faults remain on a restored system??? Dont make sense.. Did you actually do a restore or just a system repair??

[bolo1957]

no restore point. first of all on the laptop i reinstalled windows 7(when external dvd was working) and still wont work on laptop ,device manager says its working fine.tried disabling it and let windows find drivers on restart still no good. on the two hp external drives HP say there is no firmware needed for them .tried a lens cleaner on all three today still no good .both seemed to last about a week after I attached them to laptop.will try external dvd writers on other pc tomorrow. thanks for your help its much appreciated

[bolo1957]

i dug out my old desktop pc running xp and both external dvd's worked ,very slow to reconize and write discs but they worked, its got me baffled ,cant even try to reinstall w7 again as no dvd drives work with laptop although I did try that before to no avail. any help would be most appreciated

[leeds6]

try this might work


http://www.dougknox.com/xp/scripts_d...cd_dvd_fix.htm


good luck

[nibblitz]

Thats for XP... W7 doesnt require faffing about to make basic hardware things like an internal dvd drive or an external usb drive to work... It sound like you cant even get them to work before W7 is even loaded...

Maybe the bios has got a bit fubarred... Go into bios settings and set it all to hardware defaults.. You may need to make a note of the Hard Drive settings in the bios, which may be different to default settings which you may need to switch back to make sure the Hard disk is seen properly.. If that fails then go to Dell Website and see if you can download a Bios update to reflash your Laptop... Worth a go...

[bolo1957]

thanks for your help ,not sure how to go into bios settings but I tried flashing bios from dell support managed it but still not working ,same thing disc is not reconized no autoplay options come up drive makes a noise but doesnt start to spin ,if I click on icon in my computer disc ejects.

[bolo1957]

just got into bios setup and dont know if this is correct but i cant access dvd drive optriac when using up & down keys it just misses this drive out

[nibblitz]

So it sounds like the internal dvd drive of your Laptop is actually faulty then.. But then you said in earlier post that you cant even get 2 different external usb dvd drives (that work ok on another machine) to work either, thats just weird... Are these external usb DVD drives really working properly on the other machine? I'd like to be able to just tell you to look for a working secondhand internal drive for your laptop on ebay (cost about 10 to 20 quid) but then this problem you also have with known to be good USB drives not even working is causing me confusion... Putting your W7 setup disk in a drive, does your Laptop boot from the CD/DVD drive ok? Try it with the internal first, then try the external.. You may need to adjust "Boot Order" settings in the Bios to enable booting from USB..