Why will multiple dvd/cd-rom drives stop reading?

Question

I'm having difficulty with two dvd/cd drives. When I updated from XP to Vista, I noticed they wouldn't work. I could add cds or dvds to the drives and they would attempt to read the disk, but never "found" a disk in the drive. Vista showed the drives existed without problems. I updated their drivers and nothing changed. I thought perhaps, oddly, both drives were going bad.

Then I got Windows 7, and I figured I'd have to do some gymnastics in order to get it onto my system without a working disk drive. However, I can boot from the Windows 7 disk fine! I installed 7 hoping that it was a Vista problem and I'd reclaim my drives, but that is not the case. The same symptoms persist.

Thoughts?

Answer 1

As it turns out, I swapped one of the bad drives with a known good one. The known good one works in this desktop while the bad one I pulled from this machine does not work in the other desktop. So something is wrong, at least, with that one drive.

Answer 2

Upgrade of xp to vista to 7? I'm amazed that this is the worst problem. ;) i'd go for a clean install. You could probably clean oout drivers, startup apps, services, and registry settings to find the issue...but a clean install ends up being faster, more often than not.

Though you could try booting to safe mode, to see what happens.

Answer 3

I would suggest checking if there is a firmware update for the drive itself. A couple of year ago that was what fixed one NEC drive of mine.