DVD Drive not recognising CDs

maidhc

I have a strange problem:

My 3yr old Philips DVD+RW-D28 is having serious problems recognising CDs and DVDs, but can write to blank media perfect.

When I insert a recordable CD with content it reads it as a blank recordable, while it reads a factory pressed CD as being plain blank.

The problem started earlier today with a "Cyclic Redundancy Check" error when copying content from a recordable CD. I know for a fact the CD in questions has no errors.

I know the obvious pointers are that my drive is dead, or dying; but does anyone have any other suggestions?

If my drive is indeed dead, what would people suggest buying? Is a NEC a good buy or should I spend all my money on a Plextor 716 or similar...

duridian

Before giving up on it you should try upgrading the firmware, try the latest 1.68version from this site . If it still has 3 year old version of firmware it may not be able to recognise some media. Doesn't mean the drive is faulty, just needs updating for newer media.
If this does fail to improve the situation then I would recommend a NEC 35xx model as the best replacement. Plextor are very good but the price difference isn't worth it in my opinion.

Wandering Dazed

Definitely try to clean the lens also.....

maidhc

I upgraded the firmware a few weeks ago when it refused to burn to 8x discs. Even though 1.68 is supposed to be a fix for this problem, it still refused to burn them(maybe the fact they were of CMC dye?). It worked fine until yesterday on 4x discs.

I tried writing the firmware again there, and the drive worked perfect until I put in the original recordable CD, and "Data Error: Cyclic Reduncancy Check" showed up, albeit in at a different file to yesterday. The exact same CD works perfect on 3 other drives.

How would I go about cleaning the lense?

DemonOfTheFall

One of those lens cleaner CDs they sell everywhere, I think. Not sure if they help though.

ai ing

Lifted some of this from a few different articles. I had a similiar problem not long ago and this fixed it.The most frequent use why a CD or DVD port falls back to PIO mode is a scratched or otherwise unreadable CD or DVD.

To check if this is your problem
1. Open Device Manager.

2. Double-click IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers to display the list of controllers and channels.

3. Right-click the icon for the channel to which the device is connected, select Properties, and then click the Advanced Settings tab.

If it is in PIO mode or less than DMA mode 2 this could be your problem.

DMA is an abbreviation for Direct Memory Access, an access method for external devices where the data transfer is not done by the central processor, but by a small special processor called DMA controller. It uses a procedure called cycle stealing, where the central processor memory access cycles are delayed for very short times to intersperse DMA controller memory access cycles. Some newer, faster DMA modes are called UDMA (Ultra DMA).
Windows contains a trap in which quite a few computers seem to get caught sooner or later. The trap was described in a Web article whose link no longer works (and also in another one mentioned below):

The crucial paragraphs are:

PIO mode is enabled by default in the following situations:
...
For repeated DMA errors. Windows XP will turn off DMA mode for a device after encountering certain errors during data transfer operations. If more that six DMA transfer timeouts occur, Windows will turn off DMA and use only PIO mode on that device.

In this case, the user cannot turn on DMA for this device. The only option for the user who wants to enable DMA mode is to uninstall and reinstall the device.(Doesnt always work)

Windows XP downgrades the Ultra DMA transfer mode after receiving more than six CRC errors. Whenever possible, the operating system will step down one UDMA mode at a time (from UDMA mode 4 to UDMA mode 3, and so on).
...

CD-ROM and DVD-ROM drives can revert to using PIO mode, despite being set to use “DMA if Available.” Here’s how to make Windows XP redetect the DMA capabilities of the drives.

Following is the mechanism that has worked for me, please try it at your own risk, it involves hacking the registry:

1. Open RegEdit
2. Find the following KEY:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\ Class\{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\000x
3. The last four digits will be 0000, 0001, 0002, 0003, and so on.
4. Usually 0001 will be your primary ide channel and 0002 your secondary.Under the appropriate key (or all of them if you dont know where your drive is), delete all occurences of the following values:
MasterIdDataChecksum
SlaveIdDataChecksum
5. Reboot the computer. Windows will now redetect DMA settings.

maidhc

Interesting suggestions, thanks.

I did what you said, but the CD reading still fails on the same 7.5mb pdf file.

I have tried burning the same CD on two different types of media (Sony and Prodisc) and with two different burners (NEC and Sony). The philips still fails to copy the particular PDF, even though every other computer I tried has no problems.

The philips drive is also far slower to read the entire CD (86mbs) in comparison to the other drives I have tried it on. E.g. 3 - 4 mins or so versus 40 seconds or something.