DVD drive reverts to CD only after Win 7 upgrade

[GuyF]

I have a Sony Vaio VGN AW-230J laptop which uses an Optiarc BD ROM BC-5500S optical drive. This drive does CD, DVD and (supposedly) Blu-Ray (though I've never tried the latter).

After upgrading from the original Vista 64-bit to Win 7 64-bit, the optical drive will still read CDs, but not DVDs (either video or data). It also won't recognize a blank DVD.

The drive appears on the list of drives and in the dev mgr. I've updated it to the latest firmware and (re-)installed the various Win 7 x64 updates from the Sony site. This is quite a pain as most software comes on DVD now. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

 

[scout_03]

could you load the driver on a usb pen drive and install them on the system ?

 

[christop]

Go to sonys website and download the driver for your optical drive..

 

[GuyF]

I had already installed all the available updates from Sony's site (for Win7 x64). They didn't show an optical drive driver, but did have a firmware update which I've already applied (after experiencing the problem, so it didn't cause the problem). The only update I haven't applied is a BIOS update - I'm always a bit wary of changing something like that.

There seems to be a common problem with the optical drive not appearing in the list of drives (alongside C:, etc) which can be fixed with a simple registry change. I haven't seen that particular problem. Very odd for it to read CDs fine but not DVDs.

I'm up for just changing out the drive itself, but haven't yet found a manual for taking the laptop apart to do that. I'm hoping for something simple like removing a couple of screws and popping it out, but laptops are notoriously weird about having to disassemble the whole thing to replace something. I may have to resort to buying an external USB optical drive.