Not reading discs in windows, boots to liveCD fine.

[Howser87]

Hi folks, new to the site.

I am a computer tech, and one of my regular customers has brought me a new issue that I have been unable to resolve.

His computer is not reading CDs or DVDs in either of his optical drives, I tried the upper and lower filters and they didn't fix it. I have updated the drive firmwares and all the drivers on the machine. The computer will boot to a liveCD or a windows disc without problems. I found on another post here mention of nvidia drivers for a motherboard chipset causing this. I checked and he is using a VIA chipset, again I made sure the drivers were all the latest and properly installed. He insists that he did nothing prior to this happening, although he did replace one of the drives when it started.

I have tested the drives, tried other drives in his machine, checked and removed the filters, loaded the latest drivers for his motherboard and checked the drive firmware versions. I really am stumped.

Anyone seen this in the past and know a possible solution?

 

[bc4]

I'm not a certified tech but it would seem to me if you can boot from cd... then the problem lies in the software and not hardware

Further, if you updated the drivers and firmware then it is either a bad install of windows or possibly a virus.

Is it possible to throw in one of your spare drives and create a fresh install? How about doing a repair installation? Have you tried booting into safe mode (and if you can access the drives from there?) ? How about going back to a restore point?

 

[The-Darkening]

I had this happen to me sometime. Some services screw with the DVD drives.... I just went to device manager and deleted them. They were reinstalled at next reboot and they worked fine after that.

Sorry for my english!

 

[MrLinux]

Only time I've seen anything like this is on an XP64 machine, some 32bit (Sony) DRM software had been installed without prompting the user first.

 

[Christopher1]

Only time I've seen anything like this is on an XP64 machine, some 32bit (Sony) DRM software had been installed without prompting the user first.

No, I've seen this on my own machine and it is not a 64-bit machine. Here is a question: can you see the DRIVE LETTER in the My Computer window? If you cannot, I know what it is. There is a stupid registry entry that Microsoft made that allows people to 'hide' CD and DVD drives.
I don't remember exactly what it is, but I know that it was pretty easy to find on Google by searching for "CD/DVD Drive Disappears" and multiple things similar to that.