Okay, so a week or so ago, my samsung sh-s203n stopped working.  I installed a game, played for a while, and later went to eject the disk and nothing happened.  I rebooted the computer and at that point the drive stopped acting normally.  Sometimes it would open, it would almost never close (by pressing the button), and it would never actually read a disk.  After fiddling around for a bit, I decided the drive had died.  It was only a couple months old, so I RMA'd it and the replacement drive arrived in the mail today.

So, this afternoon I pop the new drive in.  I stick a game dvd in, it reads fine, everything looks good.  I walk away, go have dinner, etc. and then come back to the computer.  I sit down, hit the eject button...nothing.  After a minute or so, the disk ejects.  And now I'm back to where I started.  

If I put a disk in the drive, it will not be recognized at all.  Vista thinks the drive is empty.  Not only does it think it's empty, but after a minute or so of telling me it's empty, it ejects the drive as if to taunt me.  I've tried absolutely everything I can think of or search for.  It's an SATA drive.  The BIOS is configured properly.  I've swapped SATA cables, tried every SATA port on my motherboard, tried different power cables.  I've tried this: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929461/en-us  and currently there are no filters on the drive.  And it still doesn't work.  I'm tempted to want to just reinstall vista from scratch, but I can't because I don't have a working dvd drive.

I'll buy an IDE drive if I have to, but I'm not convinced that will solve the problem.  Like I said, the drive is a Samsung SH-S203N.  The motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L.  I also have 2 western digital sata hard drives connected, but not on a raid.  The mobo doesn't support raid, so that can't be the problem.  

Please help.  Please.  I'm going nuts.  

The best thing I can think of is to go to the devide manager and tell it to unistall the device. Get it to actually delete the drivers.
 
Then restart the machine and see where that gets you.

Also, try it on a different computer to make sure that it too hasn't died. There my be a voltage problem with your PSU, either undervolting and not powering the laser, or overvolting and killing any drive plugged into it. If it still works on a different computer, try using a different cable from the PSU. I use that drive exclusively in all the computers I build, which are all Vista machines, so I know that it's not some weird compatibility problem.

Which game did you install? I've had games that use DRM that have interferred with my DVD drives. Starforce is the number one DRM culprit, although it's got better over the years. You can try uninstalling the game then go over to starforce's web site to get the removal tool.

Do this and see if it stops, I bet it does,,..
 
1) Launch services.msc from a run command  
2) Find the SLUNotify service & stop it  
3) Find the Software Licensing service & stop it (it may say that ReadyBoost needs that service to run; stop it anyway)  
4) Restart both services, starting with Software Licensing  
 

lilsage - I've tried that and it didn't help, unfortunately.
 
nvalhalla - I've since tried the drive in a different computer, and it worked fine.  I also brought home an IDE drive from work and it had the same problems.  As far as overvoltage is concerned?  In my motherboard's bios, it reads the +12V as usually around 13.6-14.3 or so or so, would that be a problem?  The optical drives are the only issues I have.
 
hawkeye22 - I'm realizing this problem is much older than I thought, so I'm not really sure which game it would have been.  When I'm home I'll see if I have any that have DRM.
 
truehighroller - thanks for the tip, I'll give this a shot as soon as I get home.
 
Last night I completely disconnected my hard drives to just see if I could boot from the vista disk, and I wasn't able to do that (gave me an invalid boot disk error).  So maybe the problem is not with Vista, or the drive necessarily, but with the motherboard?
 
Thanks for all the help so far!

I replaced the PSU with one that was within spec on the +12V.  I also checked and have no starforce drivers on the system.  And stopping/starting those services didn't make any difference.
 
I guess the last thing to try is to RMA the motherboard.  I guess I've convinced myself it's not a software issue, so I don't know what else to try.

I hope that works for you.

Maybe the thing just doesn't like you... man that really sucks!

Well, bummer. It doesn't sound like it's a DRM issue, but how did you check for StarForce? You need to go into the device manager and select "show hidden devices". You will not find it just by scanning your hard drive for files named starforce.

i experienced the same thing sloved using a uninstalling he driver and install the default cd rom dvd rom driver  

Windows probably installed a bogus driver unistall through device manager and download the right driver from the internet.

Are you running the latest firmware?

oh thank god i found this thread. I am in the same exact situation just bought this exact drive and vista. was working fine installed a game and now it doesnt work it wil open but then imediatly closes    itself. i have vista home premium 32bit. with same exact drive the sh-s203n.

I recall reading a while back about a type of game DRM that was causing problems like you have described, I think it was an article that I read on SlashDot.
 
This sounds like a job for Samsung tech support. I wish I could be of more help, I know what a PITA this can be, when I had an issue with Vista and a dvd drive. Where if I put in a movie dvd it would bsod. My not so elegant solution was to just turn off auto play and load the movie in VLC or Video Lan.