CD player recognised by system, not reading CDs 1

[davidrobin]

This problem started a couple of months ago and has got me totally baffled. I am hoping there is some setting somewhere that needs a tweak. Hopefully some one can help....

Everything was working fine (The machine is about 1.5 years old) then the CD player would not read CDs. When I put one in the light on the front flashes, cursor changes to CD active and then nothing, the CD player does not even start spinning. If I go to windows explorer the CD is there as drive F, but when I put a CD in and click on the drive in the Folders treeview window I get a message box saying "Please insert a disc into drive F".

I have a spare DVD drive so I disconnected the CD drive and connected the DVD drive, now the puzzling thing is that will NOT recognise CDs but WILL recognise DVDs.

Also to try and solve the problem I have swapped the ribbon cable to the IDE2 IDE connection on the motherboard incase that was the problem but that had no affect.

I may just be that I need to buy a new player but the fact that DVDs are recognised to me tells me that it is not a drive fault.

The above happens with both data and music CDs

I am using WinXP Home edition. David
Visual Basic 6 Ent

 

[wolluf]

'I have a spare DVD drive so I disconnected the CD drive and connected the DVD drive, now the puzzling thing is that will NOT recognise CDs but WILL recognise DVDs' - confused me a bit. Do you mean original drive is just a CD drive and isn't reading CDs? (so probably dead drive - have you tried it in another machine)? Also, do you mean the DVD drive will read DVDs, but not CDs?

 

[CBradshaw]

david,

There are many different potential problems here.

The CD-ROM may be burnt out and therefore will not spin on insertion of a CD. However the CD's that you are trying to read may be of a rare or fairly unsupported nature which would not explain your primary issue with your un-spinning CD-Rom, but would however explain your DVD-ROM, CD reading issue. DVD-Rom's are notorious for having problems reading certain CD's. Something to do with the early DVD Players having slightly different lens/laser schemes to that of a CD-Rom (Something like that, unsure of the exact error).

So If I was you, I would try a different brand/type of CD (if blank for instance). I would also try to (if the above fails) removing the drive from the Device manager and rebooting, allowing XP to find the device itself.

Hope this helps

CBradshaw