I’m tired as hell, I’ve been working on this for a couple hours now, and I’m getting nowhere:
My main 48x CD-ROM drive died a few weeks ago, so I decided to replace it with a DVD-ROM drive, so I could watch movies in a window while doing other computer work. I ordered a 16x Lite-On DVD-ROM off of Newegg.com based on some good reviews and specs, and received it in about 4 days.
So I pull out my old CD-ROM drive, put in the DVD-ROM, connect everything up, and turn on my computer. My system BIOS auto-detects the new drive and identifies it as a DVD drive, WinXP sees it as a DVD drive.
BUT, the drive doesn’t recognize/play DVDs. I set it as region 1 (USA), and it can view and play CDs, but every time I put a DVD movie in the drive, it either: a) spools up, stops, spools up, stops, etc, forever; b) spools up, stops, and then refuses to respond at all, including the eject button; or c) locks up my computer when I try playing a DVD using PowerDVD after about 10 seconds.
Now, my computer is using 4 IDE devices: both hard drives on IDE 0 and the DVD-ROM as master and CD-RW as slave on IDE 1. Up until a few weeks ago, with my normal CD-ROM drive a master on IDE 1, everything worked fine. Then my comp just stopped recognizing CDs in that main CD-ROM drive, and then the drive would fail to read discs - it would spool up, stop, spool up, stop, in an endless cycle.
Thinking my DVD drive problem may be related to bad cables, I replaced the IDE cable that connects my optical drives, and I also replaced the power cables connecting them. Still no luck.
Please, anyone out there have any insight into this problem? I’ve been working on it since midnight - it’s now quarter to three, seriously, and I’m practically passing out at my keyboard but this problem is annoying me so much I have to at least post this.