Cannot read dvd-r's

mikeyd

I cannot read dvd-r's on my ibm thinkpad laptop - the dvd rom drive is a matsh1ta sr-8175 that slots into the ibm ultrabase. (I had to replace the i in the manufacturers name with a 1 otherwise it is filtered out with !!!!)

I have thought about updating the firmware on the drive but do not know how to determine what the current version I have is.

Does anyone know how to determine current firmware or have any other suggestions on how to get my drive to read writable dvd-r's?

Thanks.

brummybloke

search drivers.com or infact google for your firmware, it will tell you the latest one and it will tell you the date it was released, if it is recent then i guess you will know if you have updated, if you havent updated and you try and update woth an older firmware you will be ok normally, it will tell you you have a newer firmware.

blimey this cd/dvd drive is very old dude. 2000/2001

it may have run its course if you have been using it for years and years.

do the dvdr work on other machines? with the same software? have the dvdr been finalised? if a film, have you got the correct codecs updated?

have you cleaned the lens with a cd cleaner?

mikeyd

Thanks for the advice

The dvd-r's do read in another machine and the lens of the dvd drive is clean.
It isn't films on the disks, it is just data files which I have backed up off of my main machine.
I managed to find some firmware updates for it (which many or may not fix the problem here. The firmware version I currently have is G228. The problem I have now is that the firmware needs to be flashed in Real DOS mode (Not under a Windows Command prompt). But since I run Windows XP there is no "Real DOS" anymore, so I'm not sure how to go about flashing the firmware.

brummybloke

you can boot up in dos mode m8

Alfie_E

mikeyd wrote:

The dvd-r's do read in another machine and the lens of the dvd drive is clean.

Don’t think I’m being insulting, but it is a DVD-R disc, and not a DVD+R one? From what I can see on the Internet, the Matshíta drive doesn’t read DVD+R discs.

mikeyd wrote:

The problem I have now is that the firmware needs to be flashed in Real DOS mode (Not under a Windows Command prompt). But since I run Windows XP there is no "Real DOS" anymore, so I'm not sure how to go about flashing the firmware.

You could always “borrow” a boot disc from elsewhere. For example, here is a page from the Dell website that makes a DOS boot disc for a specific bit of their hardware. If you make the disc, you can simply delete the unwanted files on the disc and replace them with the ones you have (and edit autoexec.bat).

intel

brummybloke wrote:

you can boot up in dos mode m8

Not on XP unless you get a boot disk and even then its pretty useless.

CIS

use a windows 98 floppy disk, it should enable to you to get in to dos and do what you need.

intel

CIS wrote:

use a windows 98 floppy disk, it should enable to you to get in to dos and do what you need.

Nah cus 98 is FAT and XP is NTFS so that wont work.

That ones a bit of an urban myth.

mikeyd

thanks to everyone who replied.

I managed to update my firmware using a utility I eventually found on ibm's website. I still cannot read the dvd-r's I was trying to read, but I can read some dvd-r discs, so I think I will just leave it the way it is now. It could be the way the discs have been burned, and whilst they will read on some types of drives, they will not read on others.

jjames_3

> Don’t think I’m being insulting, but it is a DVD-R disc, and not a DVD+R one? From what I can see on the Internet, the Matshíta drive doesn’t read DVD+R discs.

That is a very good point. Panasonic drives of this vintage do not read DVD+Rs. In fact, I'm not even sure if they were designed to read DVD-Rs.

What brand are the discs? Some old drives need very good quality media otherwise they spit them out.

mikeyd

The discs that I am trying to read are both DVD-R format, and are both made by RiDisc. The ones I cannot read are 8x discs but were burned using a different DVD-writer to the 4x RiDisc discs that I can read.

The 8x discs that cannot be read on my laptop, can however be read on other machines.