Wasn't sure the specific section to put this, so if in wrong section please move it, Thanks
Anyways, here's the story, I went over to my brothers to try & fix his DVDRW problems.
a couple months ago, I bought a new Samsung DVDRW drive for his PC (my old Athlon Thunderbird PC, 1.3GHz Athlon T-bird, 512MB PC133, AGP GeForce 4 Ti-4200 64MB, some C-Media cheapo sound card, 60GB ATA100 HDD, 20GB ATA33 HDD. Windows XP Home, with SP2, as well as all necessary updates (just updated it tonight)
anyways, the Samsung DVDRW stopped working for them, I suggested a couple things, didn't work, so he went out yesterday & bought a Pioneer DVDRW (Pioneer DVR-1810 I believe?) from Best Buy of all places, spent over $50 almost $60 on it too
its an internal IDE drive.
anyways, he tried to get that working, to no avail.
from my observations & attempts tonight, the samsung drives motor probably burned out somehow, as there is absolutely no movement of Disk in drive, drive opens & closes, but never spins up or anything.
with the other one though, Pioneer drive, in Windows it recognizes it, as well as in the Bios (drive is already updated with latest firmware, before anyone suggests that, I checked & tried already, its updated with latest), in My Computer it says DVD-RW Drive E: when you pop in a disc, such as a CD disk, the one we were using was for Nero 7, it changes to CD Drive E: or something, so it recognizes a disc in the drive, but to the left side it states 0 Bytes on disk... open the Disc it comes up empty...
the same thing happens with the Samsung drive, at least the 0 Bytes part when a disc is inserted, but of course it doesn't spin up or anything.
We used an old CDROM drive they had, same story as the Pioneer, but this time it doesn't even display th Bytes on the left side.
Everything I tried, checked bios for settings, everything is set right, the optical drives are plugged in to the secondary IDE channel, only one at a time, as its a short single device IDE cable.
checked jumper settings, all correct, made sure connections were snug & plugged right, even resorted to disconnecting the 2nd HDD to plug in on the Primary IDE channel with the Boot drive incase it was a bad IDE cable or possibly the 2nd IDE channel was going bad... still same results... didn't know if it was possible they bought a DOA drive, but seeing as the old CDROM was working, & had same results it leads me to believe its something with the mobo or Windows?
any idea's on what could be happening?
Tomorrow, after work, I'm bringing my spare PCI ATA100/RAID controller card over, plugging that in, hook the DVDRW to it & see if it comes up, if it does, it'll fix it for now, till they can get a new PC, as this one is a bit old, the Mobo is an FIC AZ-11E mobo if I remember right?
if not, have no clue what to do... I do have a spare PC that DOES work, that they can use, but its my old school PC the Athlon 800MHz Slot A based rig, its only got 64MB PC100 & a VERY small HDD, but it'd get them by I guess, but would have to back up all their crap etc etc. I do have my old Game rig, the X2 4200+, but there's no way in hell I'm letting them borrow that, it'd come back all f***ed up, & with a Dual Core, 7800GT & a 74GB Raptor in it... HHHHEEEEELLLLLLLLLLLL NO!!!
if I could get my Slim PC working, uses a 1GHz T-bird & DDR266/333, I could easily swap in/out the CPU's, swap HDD's, uses a laptop CDRW, onboard sound & video, the mobo is a PC Chips Socket A board, but it would run faster & better than their current system with the DDR memory. also uses a 1U Thermaltake Copper HSF for CPU... would sell it to them for very cheap
but it would be a good system for them... BUT I really don't want to have to LOL.
but any ideas on what the deal with the optical drives are? the HDD's work fine on the IDE channels, the opticals don't?
is there some settings in Windows I'm missing?
possibly some virus on their system or something similar?
TIA
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