DVD drive problem.

[Blue Moon Dragon]

Hey guys,i'm having a slight problem here
I bought an SATA DVD burner a couple months ago, and it stopped working. It still opens and gets power, but it is not recognized. Neither the BIOS nor Windows XP recognizes it. In the BIOS it says IDE Channel 0 Master (my other drive) is recognized, but SATA1, IDE Channel 3 Slave/Master, and SATA2 are not recognized. I tried everything. I tried plugging it into my other SATA slot, i tried redoing my whole computer's wiring. I also tried to change all the SATA from RAID to non-Raid, becaue i thought that might be doing something wierd w/ my SATA controller. I think it is the mainboard's problem because the drive still opens when i press the button. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks :help::help::help::help:

[timberwolf120]

Is your motherboard BIOS up to date?

[Frag Maniac]

I was thinking the orther way round. If it was working at one point then you updated the MB BIOS or made some other significant change, that could be what's causing it. Maybe a BIOS setting change or something is in order.

[timberwolf120]

You are right. I wasn't thinking clearly when I read his post.
My initial thoughts were that older motherboards had issues recognizing SATA optical drives. Well, this is what I've heard. And it has been a long while... So I figured that his mobo might fall into that category and and BIOS update would hopefully fix that, if addressed by the manufacturers.

[Acidtears33]

Try to update your firmware of the drive.

Try a new SATA cable for the drive.

Check to see if there are any jumpers on the drive (probably not)

Finally remove all but one HDD and the DVD drive and see what you get.

If this all fails you have a bum drive

[Bio-Hazard]

If it simply stopped working on it's own (nothing in the system changed), try a different cable, then try another port. If neither solution helps, the drive just up and died (yes, even if it powers up and the tray ejects). You should try pulling it and trying it in another system just to be sure though.

If all else fails, you can try re flashing the drives firmware, but more than likely it the optics on the controler inside the drive that has failed.

Lots and lots of firmware updates and hacks for optical drives or all makes and models...........;)

http://codeguys.rpc1.org/index.html

[Blue Moon Dragon]

Yeah, i was thinking its a drive or cable problem, but what worries me is that the mouse ps2 port on my MB doesnt work either thats why i think its the sata slots

[Blue Moon Dragon]

i've tried removing various drives, but it still won't work. in fact, when i had the sata drive plugged in, and tried to reinstall windows xp by booting to the cd, it gave me a blue fatal error screen..i unplugged the drive, and was able to install xp successfully. i'll try resetting the BIOS and see what happens..

[Frag Maniac]

Be very cautious about firmware updating an optical drive. It's not really good to do so unless the update is really needed.

[Kougar]

Be aware you cannot install windows XP from a SATA based DVD drive. XP needs you to load specialized drivers for that to work, otherwise after the first reboot it will be unable to find the disc drive and typically BSOD.

[Bio-Hazard]

Be aware you cannot install windows XP from a SATA based DVD drive. XP needs you to load specialized drivers for that to work, otherwise after the first reboot it will be unable to find the disc drive and typically BSOD.
Sure you can, all depends on the MoBo and the SATA controler on the board............:jawdrop: All I have is a SATA Lite-On DVDRW and the install works great from the drive. As a matter of fact, I don't even need any special drivers for the system to correctly see my SATA HD...........:icon_tiphat:. I haven't had a PATA optical drive on this system from the day I built it.
I can cold boot from the SATA DVDRW as well to flash system and video card bios, it works just as well as my old PATA DVDRW drive that's now in the wifes rig.

[Kougar]

Well then you are extremely lucky! Users of Intel chipsets will not find the needed drivers built into any currently shipping version of Windows XP. SATA hard drives will work fine for most users during a new install, but SATA optical drives will not. You are the first person I've heard that hasn't had an issue with it. :)

When I first built my new rig with the just launched 965P chipset I had no such luck. Some google work later I figured out that XP with SP2 doesn't have the ability to work with SATA based optical drives, even if left on legacy IDE mode in the BIOS. In a moment of frustration I forgot this and tried to install XP on my new P35 board with the exact same results. There is a plethora of articles on this explaining how to use a floppy drive and F6, or slipstreaming them onto a new XP disc.

It was just another reason I like Vista, as Vista has all the neccesary drivers built in and does not suffer from this problem.

[timberwolf120]

I've done it with no problems. I used a Sony sata burner, but on a Nvidia 680i SLI chipset (haven't tried on an Intel chipset yet).

[Bio-Hazard]

My MSI board has been great with the SATA support, not sure how the XFX 680i LT board will act with it, one of these days I'll give it a shot to find out. I even have a option at the boot screen to select which drive I want to boot from (any of the HD's, USB drives, USB flash drives, SATA Optical drives and so on up to 11 different devices) without going into the bios. Just hit F11 at the boot screen, select the drive I want to boot from and I'm off, doesn't matter what format the drive is.

[Kougar]

So in a nutshell everyone is saying Nvidia chipsets don't require a SATA driver for XP to install from a SATA-based DVD drive.

That is rather interesting... but the same can't be said for Intel chipsets. Ignoring myself, there are plenty of instances of this happening, enough that the net is full of how-to and self-help articles on getting around this problem. :)

Both my 965P and P35 Gigabyte boards also offer a boot menu that does not require entering the BIOS to use. That doesn't work in this scenario because XP will not detect the previous attempt to install, and instead start the install from scratch again before BSODing at the next reboot. If I reinstall my old IDE DVD_RW drive I have zero installation problems.

To much of a headache for me, you won't find a single IDE or floppy ribbon cable clogging up the inside of my case. :)

[Bio-Hazard]

I can't sat that all Nvidia chipset boards from all makers won't have issues, all I know is that mine (MSI) works great with Windows XP...........:)

No IDE or floppies here as well, much easier to work around IMHO............;)

http://img440.imageshack.us/img440/9779/101jh9.jpg

[Blue Moon Dragon]

Well, it also might have been the memory, but i doubt it. i tried memtest,and it came up with a bunch of errors on my pqi ddr1 512 memory...i removed that, but if nothing works, i'll just invoke the great power of the manufacturer's warranty....