Win XP Not Recognizing DVD Drive

My old DVD burner failed to work properly so I replaced the same and installed Lite-On LH-20A1L-06 DVD burner. I had purchased the same from a nearby computer shop. Now after connecting it, when I inserted a disc it wont read it. The system freezed. I have to restart, remove the drive and then the computer works back again. I am having Windows XP 64bit OS and it is not reading the disc which I had created in old dvd drive. I checked in BIOS the drive is listed there and so it means that it is working. If there was issue with cable or hardware then it would not be detected. What should I do know.

Check once again the bios. Change the drive cable or connector if possible. As the system freezes that means there is some issue with the haardware itself due to which your system is not able to work with it. Did you had installed it properly. Do one thing do not insert any drive. Connect it and start your Windows. Go in Device Manager. You must see a DVD drive installed. If there is any yellow exclamation mark, then it looks there is some kind of driver issue with this device.

I have a small home system. I had installed a sata controller on the same. Now my OS when boot finds a new hardware and installation goes well. I am using a RAID/AHCI controller tool on my system to configure the drives in bios. Now when I added a new drive it was not found in the controller utility. That means new drive lack support for older chipset. This is a common issue with home built system. You can do one ting. You can arrange for a addon card to hook the dvd drive on it if it is not working on the default mode. Just update the new drivers and try back.

I own a Gigabyte board. And I face exactly the same issue. Just added a new DVD burner and it fails to read the old disc. While I can burn new disc in it. It does not looks like a issue with compatibility among different system. I had updated the bios and thank god it is working. So try to run a fresh bios update. Your bios might be outdated because of which you are not able to get it work. There are additional connectors in your system. You can use them.

This is so ridiculous. To burn some videos I borrowed my friends DVD burner. He gave me this for two days and from last couple of hours I am trying to connect it. It is not working at any condition. There is light on the front panel and it is also listed in bios. I can see the dvd in Device Manager also. But when I insert any dvd in it it freezes. I have Windows Vista with me. The explorer just shows the green bar which keeps on loading and does not end. I have a XP laptop which can read the dvd quiet well. It has a old DVD rom not even a writer. This is the most common issue I had seen in Windows Vista only.

If you go on the official site of dvd drive manufacturer you can find a relative driver or firmware update for different OS. You can use that to make it work. Somehow due to old bios or outdated drivers, new devices are not able to communicate well with the internal hardware. That makes this system very weak in performance. Also if possible try to locate the motherboard manual. This document has settings for configuring the sata controllers in legacy mode.

Do one thing. Buy a good enclosure for your DVD drive. What is the connector you are using. Is it a SATA or IDE. I had purchased a cheap external DVD Rom exclosure that allows me to use it through a usb cable. I can burn disc and copy video from DVD drives. It is a bit slow but instead of wasting the entire device you can use it with enclosure. And if your DVD is IDE then there are number of SATA controller cards that you can use to hook it on the system.

There is one thing that you can try but that would be more annoying. Testing the DVD drive in another system. There can be issue with compatibility or cable also. It will give you idea that the device that you bought is really working or not. I am yet not shocked to find this issue in Windows. I too agree that Vista has the most common problem of reading disc which is created in different OS. It is due to region lock or some dvd drm settings that makes it unreadable. But those thing does not trouble the hardware.