My DVD combo drive on Sony Vaio laptop VGN-FW11ZU does not recognise any DVD's and asks me to format the blank disc in the drive. Autoplay only asks what I want to burn to the disc - it does not recognise the content.

Normally I would:
1. Go into Device manager and uninstall the drive and reboot allowing Windows to reinstall the generic drivers to solve corruption issues.

2. Use some canned air to blow out the drive with the tray open followed by a pass with a lens cleaning disc.

3. Update the firmware following their instructions to the letter to support more types of media disc's.

4. Buy a new drive and install it.

That was brilliant advice and exactly what I did. The lens cleaner did it, but why does no-one put that option first?
Thanks for your help!

I suppose the order I gave could be to swap the cleaning and the Device Manager trick, but I guess I assume its possible most have tried the disk cleaning already and still had problems. The Device Manager uninstall is relatively safe since Windows uses no special drivers for optical drives as long as you don't mess up and uninstall your virtual drive for Daemon Tools or Alcohol 120% by accident its safe. Just for your info and cause your so nice to complement me I will tell you an issue that happened to me. Microsoft decided that if an optical drive errors five times, it will drop your DMA setting by one in an attempt to correct the issue, but usually the error continues and eventually your drive ends up in PIO mode and will not run correctly. There is a registry trick to delete a few lines and it forces the DMA back to full but unless you correct the problem causing the drive to error its only temporary. In my case I had to swap my two opticals from master to slave and visa versa to stop the errors. My DVD burner refused to be a slave.

You can check your DMA mode in Device Manager under the IDE devices and select secondary ide properties then advanced (primary IDE if your optical is on the primary IDE connection). It takes a little sherlock holmesing to figure out what's what since there is no device name listed but opticals will most likely be lower DMA than a newer hard drive. If you see any PIO modes in there you could have a problem.