richard said:
windows 7 home premium 64 bit.
HP pavillion dv7-4065dx
Under device manager the unit is listed as
hp BDDVDRW CT21L ATA Device
A few months ago I had a malicious bit of software attack my system and I
wound up having to buy a windows 7 disk in order to use the machine.
Tonight, I plugged in a dvd disk with absolutely no results.
Not even the fateful "please insert disk" message showed up.
Windows explorer is showing nothing. Not even a title.
Question is, is it the DVD itself or is their a driver I need to install?
The driver shown in device manager is a stock MS one.
The DM is showing the device working properly.
Why not insert the Windows 7 home premium installer DVD,
or other bootable media, and test whether the computer
can boot from the DVD ? Make sure the optical drive is
in the boot order, as set in the BIOS setup screen. It
should be ahead of the hard drive(s), in the boot order,
in order to get picked up.
If it can boot some bootable media, then the drive is working,
and something is stuck in your Windows install. A CD/DVD
will have two lasers, and booting from one kind of media
or the other, proves the laser for that kind of media
is working. The same laser is used for burning, but at
a different intensity level. So getting a DVD to boot
in the computer, only proves the DVD laser is there.
It's also possible to cook up an alternative burning software
solution, outside of Windows, to prove the burner can actual
burn a CD or DVD, but we don't need to do that just yet. And
that's a *lot* more work and time.
As for reasons for misbehavior, Windows is certainly capable
of fouling up on its own. But malware multiplies the spectrum
of problems immensely. For example, the TDSS rootkit, hooks
things like storage drivers, in order to hide itself and have
a good time. And you never know, when what you're seeing, is
a side effect of stuff like that. If there was no malware
in the world, solving these problems would be a lot easier.
One other popular cause of problems, is UpperFilter/LowerFilter
entries in the registry. A recently installed burner package,
even something "innocent" like iTunes from Apple, can have
side effects. You can either do it the hard way, or try the
Fixit, to restore sanity. An "UpperFilter" is a shim in the
protocol stack, that allows recently added software to intercept
stuff or inject stuff. Once you remove that, I'm not really sure
what side effects it has on the recently installed software.
But the idea is, it's supposed to get your drive working
again for other things.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/982116
In terms of booting troubles, the boot test I suggested in
paragraph one, isn't always bulletproof. To give an example,
I was fooling around with a seven year old Pentium 4 system.
I'd just "zeroed" the MBR on the single hard drive in the
system, in preparation for doing an OS install. Effectively,
that's like the disk is filled with zeros from end to end,
equivalent to a security erasure. When I turned on the computer
power next, and the BIOS setup started, it took
one look at the hard drive and freaked out
Even though a
bootable CD was inserted in the drive tray, it was duly ignored,
as the computer tried instead, to PXE boot from the network.
I ended up prepping the disk over again, putting a small
empty FAT32 partition on it, with another computer. Installing
the now "sane" hard drive back in the seven year old computer, it
would again boot from my installer CD. Great fun. So the
BIOS in that computer is not happy, unless a valid MBR is
present in sector 0. We know your hard drive has valid file
systems and the like on it, so the odds of seeing that
BIOS bug are close to zero.
Paul
