[OT] DeeVeeDee

[Dribble Joy]

Right, so my current DVD drive doesn't recognise DVDs, it thinks nothing is in the worky bits. It used to, and much fun was had watching visual entertainment. Alas no more.
I presumed (naiively one now presumes) the drive was just getting on a bit and suffering from some form of electronic Altziemers.
So I didst strip the casing away and assaulted the infernal device with a driver of screws. Switching the (presumably) dodery piece of redundant hardware for one of two other newer (looking) ones my mate had given me when he was going through his stuff.
No longer naked and purring upon one's desk, the BIOS loading aflickers with the information that it is a DVD drive. One's hopes are rising in conjunction with something else at the prospect of being able to devour the media contained within the several plastic and metal circles of naughtyness.
Alas these hopes and my semi were dashed (or softened in the case of the latter) as when as I was testing the damnable thing with something a little more safe (Jerry Clarkson - bloody parents.... though one supposes they don't really know what else to get their son when his Christmas lists consist of 1: Chocolate and 2: Money, year after year).
Up went my DVD playing type software and when I went to select disk/drive/place/thing/grandma/??? I got the inevitable: 'Please insert disk into Drive F:'.

So, my utter boredom during the period while my ISP takes a small holdiday inbetween moving my broadband to my new house (what else are those gimps doing? Playing Cowboys and Indians round the office? 10 days to cancel and 7-10 to reactivate? Bunch of willy goo if one asks one), cannot for the meantime be sated by porn or watching a Daily Mail collumnist blow up cars (or Natasha Henstridge... rampant totty.....).
Unless you fine fellows and.. fellow... ettes?... can assist.
I clearly have a DVD drive, it runs CDs fine, there's nowt wrong with the drives or the DVD software. It just can't recognise it.
Is there some form of drivers I can get hold of? Do they have to me model specific?

[Mighty Max]

Depending on the age of your drive, it might be that it does not read the different DVD formats, and sticks only to one of them.

[Brammers]

Have you tried a new IDE cable?

[yavimaya]

Well, he said that it reads CD's.
And also wouldnt it "not recognise" the drive at all?
wouldnt the IDE cable have to work for the computer to "know/think" there is no DVD in the drive?

[Brammers]

Well, he said that it reads CD's.
And also wouldnt it "not recognise" the drive at all?
wouldnt the IDE cable have to work for the computer to "know/think" there is no DVD in the drive?

There is 40 or 80 wires connecting the motherboard and the DVD-Rom drive. It only takes one of them to break before odd things happen or your DVD-Rom don't work at all. A new cable is only a few pounds, and it's worth trying one just to rule it out.

One other thing, last night my DVD rom drive started acting up. I put in a DVD that had files on it, and it wouldn't see the disk at all. There was about 5 windows updates waiting to be installed, so I let windows XP reboot and install those updates. After that it was fine... :confused:

[Uho]

dvdr drives usually die on the cd side first
but have seen a few drives that can read cd's fine but the dvd side is done... :P

like my pioneer a03 that i paid 1100 euros for... :P
even its broken i cant throw it away

[nEo-1664]

As for your broadband, you should have requested a MAC(Migration Away Code), ironically, this 'should' reduce the time period upon which one can switch broadband providers :) So rather than one waiting for upto 20days(working days in the case of some service providers), the whole transfer could take only 7 days or even, in some cases, only a couple of days :)

as for hte DVD issue, I would go with Brammers on changing the IDE, failing that, do you have any other DVD drives, on your pc, ie: dvd-rw ? if so, throw the DVD into there, and see what comes up. Occassionally, my DVD-RW doesn't read a DVD, but my DVD-ROM does, and vise-versa, its just stupid like that at times :)