dvd burner recognizes cds but not dvd

[bhassenp]

Help! my sons' dvd burner recognizes cds just fine but will not recognize any dvd. I already uninstalled it in control panel, shut down the computer, restarted. On restart it recognized the drive, installed, then restarted it again. No change, still will not recognize a dvd (says "no disk in drive")

 

[cwwozniak]

It could be that the drive has gone bad. There are separate optical pickups used for DVD and CD reading. Have you tested the drive with a commercially pressed DVD and not just burned ones?

 

[bhassenp]

yes - same thing with burned as well as commercial

 

[cwwozniak]

A failed DVD pickup is probably the most likely cause. These days it would probably be cheaper to just the place the drive rather than trying to replace the pickup. There is a slight chance that carefully cleaning the pickup would cure the problem.

You could run a program like Nero Info Tool to confirm that the operating system actually sees the DVD capabilities of the drive. If it only shows up as CD drive, you could have software driver problems. Nero Info Tool is a free program with a download link on the Nero web site:

http://www.nero.com/enu/support-nero8-tools-utilities.html

 

[bhassenp]

Thanks!

 

[DaChew]

make sure it's not a filter driver issue, a bootable dvd would test the drive and eliminate hardware
malfunction

http://www.cdr-zone.com/forum/about4719.html

http://www.bustrace.com/products/devfilter.htm