PC DVD Player help

tom188

My first time this far down the board as I usually restrict myself to the money section - hopefully someone will be able to help.

The DVD player on my PC (Acer/Win XP Prof) has been not working for some time - ive only had it for about 9 months but thought it had just broken. Anyway today I went out and bought a new one, and that doesnt work either, which leads me to think its some problem with the setup itself rather than the drive.

Essentially all seems well until I insert a CD/DVD, but then nothing happens - in My Computer the picture changes from DVD/CD RW Drive to CD Drive but nothing more. The new device is a USB external player and that cant be accessed either.

Ive tried searching for the solution on the net, but cant find anything that seems to answer my query. As I need to upload some software from a CD for work this is rather a pain, and I would be very grateful if anyone could give me suggestions of things to try. I can supply any further details on the setup required.

Thanks

Jzpop

1. With a CD in (either) drive, what happens when you go to My Computer, right-click the drive with the disc in and choose Explore? Do you see the files on the CD?

2. If not, Go to Start, right-click My Computer and choose Manage. Then click on Disk Management in the left-hand pane that opens, and see if your CD and/or DVD drives are listed on the right. If they are, in the right-hand pane right-click a drive and choose Properties. On the General tab, check to see if you have a message that says 'This device is working properly'.

tom188

Thanks for your response

With the internal one when I explore I just get an empty window.
With the external one I am told the disk is not accessible, access denied.

When I go to disk management only my c (hard drive) is viewable. However in device manager the USB and internal dvd drive properties both say that the devices are operating normally.

Jzpop

I would go into Device manager, select them and press delete. After a reboot, they should be found OK.

If Disk Manager does not accept that they are present, you will not be able to use them.

tom188

Thanks, I tried this and although they came back into device manager, they have not come back into disk manager. Any ideas what to try next?

Jzpop

There are several reasons that come to mind...

A CD/DVD recording program (e.g. Roxio) is installed, but conflicting with XP - check if you have any installed, uninstall them and reboot

A physical connection is loose (although unlikely, as you have the same problem with an external USB drive)

An aspi layer conflict (should be resolved by uninstalling software as above.

If you are comfortable with editing the Registry, MS themselves have posted a fix that involves removing the upper and lower filters. This will force a re-detect of your CD/DVD drives on reboot. See -
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=314060

Similar but slightly different approach... see -
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/320553/

tom188

Thanks for this, but having tried this ive still no joy. Any other ideas?

Jzpop

Hmmmm..... puzzling.

Try the link below. Scroll down to almost the bottom of the page, look for a reference in the left-hand column to 'Restore missing CD drive'.

http://www.aumha.org/regfiles.php

You will see a link to download a zipped script called cdgone (in fact, a small registry file that will be merged to your registry). This should work, by re-setting the upper and lower filters, as well as making a few other minor patches. Read the readme file within the zip file first.

tom188

Ok thanks for this i'll try this this evening

tom188

i tried cdgone, and still no luck. really scratching my head on this one...

Jzpop

tom188 wrote: »

i tried cdgone, and still no luck. really scratching my head on this one...

You and me both

Can you just check that the hardware detection shell service is enabled?

Start > Run > services.msc , look for ShellHWDetection in the list of services. Check that the service is started, and the startup type is automatic.

If not, double-click the service, make those changes, click apply, re-insert a CD and see whether it is detected.