Easy People,

I am having some trouble with my DVD Drive. I do apologise if this has already been resolved elsewhere or if I've posted in the wrong place, but I couldn't see a resolution anywhere and hey, I'm new.

My OS is XP Home, my DVD Drive is a Sony DDU1612 Firmware DYS3, and presently it won't read any type of disc I insert. I'm not sure exactly why this is, but there is a posibility that I formatted the drive in My Computer, Right-Click, Format. Not sure though.

I don't know what the most relivant info that would help is, but there are no faults found in Device Manager. I ran Nero Info Tool and the only strange things I noticed there is that there is no read/write speeds highlighted for the drive. The System SCSI is running with no problems. The BIOS knows the Drive is there also. One strange thing I noticed in Disk Management was that the DVD drive is the only drive on my system that has no Partition Style while all the others are Master Boot Record, again I don't know how relevant all this is to my problem. Another thing I noticed was that when I do try to run a disc, the error message on my computer shows the source of the problem as 'ATAPI'.

As you can probably tell, my computing abilities are limited and any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks, J.

Hello Bully86, and welcome to the forum
I assume this is a drive that was working, and now it isnt? Running the format option from the menu wont harm the drive, if it were a dvd-rw it would just write the lead in tracks to the disk and prepare it for writing, but being a dvd-rom, the options would probably be grayed out in the dialog box that came up. Device manager doesnt always tell the truth, it may say a device is working properly when it isnt. Go back to device manager, and uninstall the drivers, reboot and let windows reinstall it. See if that helps, and maybe check to see if you have the latest firmware updates. If an installation disk with drivers came with it , which it probably didnt, reinstall those.

Hi There Uncleed!

Yes the drive was certainly working fine before and no hardware changes have been made to cause this problem. I followed your advice and unistalled the drive in Device Manager, when I restarted Windows correctly identified the drive as a DDU1612 followed by 'CD-ROM drive', but unfortunately that was all and it didn't resolve the issue itself. Thanks for your help though, it's much appreciated.

PS the firmware's up to date and the manufacturers didn't send me any discs!

Hi Bull

Welcome to PC Help Forums

Have you recently installed any new programs?
Have a look here for the reason I asked this.
CD or DVD drive not recognized by Windows after you install an Adobe application - Support Knowledgebase

Easy Wolf,

No mate, no new software is interferring, cheers for the suggestion.

Hi Bully,

Check to see if your Primary and Secondary IDE Channels are set to PIO or DMA

You want them to DMA.

If you don't know how to get there, please let me know and I'll let you know