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SmpsonH · Sep 27, 2008, 09:23 PM

I have a regular DVD drive and a DVD/RW drive. The RW drive is newer, just added it about a year ago. For a long time, both drives have been working perfectly, no problems at all. Just recently, neither of the drives work now. I will put in a disc and it says no disc in drive. With enough effort (and rebooting) I can sometimes eventually make them find the discs. Then if I take the disc out, it will not work again. I tried all the discs on other computers and they worked fine. Someone recommended going here: You can no longer access the CD drive or the DVD drive, or you receive an error message after you remove a CD recording program or a DVD recording program in Windows XP: "error code 31"
That did not seem to work either. Can anybody please help me with my problem?

mechanickid · Sep 27, 2008, 10:08 PM

Do you have any other system to test them on, its interesting that neither of them are working at the same time, I'm thinking this is a hardware issue not related to the drives themselves, possibly a secondary IDE channel confliction, how old is your system?

seahwk83 · Sep 27, 2008, 11:04 PM

So you did remove the upper and lower filters and then rebooted and after removing the filters.

Now after the reboot, still have problem with drives working?

Any changes that either happened or that you perhaps made to your computer around the time that the problem started; particularly any software or hardware that you installed or setup.

SmpsonH · Sep 28, 2008, 10:42 AM

What do you mean by another system to test them on? Remove the drives and try them on another computer? I don't really have access to another computer to do that. My system is fairly old, maybe 3-4 years old. I can't think of any software I would have installed that made them stop working. I've run virus scans and all that, nothing major pops up. And yes, I did remove the upper and lower filters and rebooted, and nothing changed. I'm not sure if maybe I need new drivers or something, but I really don't know anything about what brand dvd drives they are, so I'm not sure which drivers I should get.

seahwk83 · Sep 28, 2008, 12:28 PM

If they had worked before and now all of a sudden they do not, something would indicate a change made to system, whether it be hardware or software.

Was anything installed since the last time you used the drives, such as a dvd writing software or other type of software

SmpsonH · Sep 28, 2008, 01:46 PM

It wasn't really all of a sudden. I can't really pinpoint when exactly they stopped working, but it seemed like it happened gradually. First the auto-start would not work when I put discs in, but I could still play the disk manually. Now, they don't recognize discs at all, but it is not all the time, only about 75% of the time. Occasionally, they will still work for some things. One thing which was really odd, last night I was trying to install a game, and I finally got the install to start, but halfway through, it would say read error or something, saying it could no longer read the disc. So it seemed to be working and then just stop working in the middle of use.

seahwk83 · Sep 28, 2008, 04:30 PM

Does this happen in both drives?

See if you can try a system restore back to a couple of days ago to see if that might make a difference.

Click Start, point to All Programs, point to Accessories, point to System Tools, and then click System Restore. System Restore starts.

3. On the Welcome to System Restore page, click Restore my computer to an earlier time (if it is not already selected), and then click Next.

4. On the Select a Restore Point page, click the most recent system checkpoint in the On this list, click a restore point list, and then click Next. A System Restore message may appear that lists configuration changes that System Restore will make. Click OK.

5. On the Confirm Restore Point Selection page, click Next. System Restore restores the previous Windows XP configuration, and then restarts the computer.

6. Log on to the computer as Administrator. The System Restore Restoration Complete page appears.

7. Click OK.

mechanickid · Sep 28, 2008, 08:13 PM

This is really intresting, I would normaly say the laser is going,, but BOTH drives, at the same time no less... no way

SmpsonH · Jan 1, 2009, 05:38 PM

Just a quick update in case anyone else has had this problem. I took apart my computer and took both drives out and cleaned all the dust out and reconnected them. I believe that this has helped it, so I think it probably just had a piece of dust or something lodged deep in there that was hindering them from working properly. I had used canned air on them before without taking them apart, but that never helped. I think the full cleaning solution has helped though.