DVD burner doesn’t read all my discs.

[DJM1972]

Plextor 712a I think I bought it in 2004.

I tried to install the firmware but it said it couldn’t find the drive. At one point I put another Ide hard drive in then removed it and stuck a CD burner in. Everything shows up fine in the device manager. Pretty weird because it plays my Battlefield 2 game and my installation disc’s but it won’t play any of the disc that I drag and dropped too using roxio drag to disc or just dragged to. I got 3 operating systems in this old pc and all 3 operating systems do this. And I don’t have any other pc’s hooked up. I think I’m going to take them to my friends. I remember once seeing an Input/output error pop up but it disappeared as quickly as it came.

I wonder if a new external DVD burner would solve the problem. Probably easier than formatting.

 

[johnb35]

You probably have a bad drive as they do go out from time to time. Some quit altogether while others stop reading cd's but can read dvd's or vice versa. Why get an external drive when you can replace the internal dvd drive?

 

[DJM1972]

You probably have a bad drive as they do go out from time to time. Some quit altogether while others stop reading cd's but can read dvd's or vice versa. Why get an external drive when you can replace the internal dvd drive?

I was just looking at some of the new external dvd drives and my mouth is watering and I'm getting a trigger finger.
I've been wanting to try an external drive for years. I can only imagine how much easier they are to hook up and install. As apposed to the old internal. Right now I think I have at least 4 IDE drives in this pc. I guess why I want an external drive is because I don't have to worry about make a bad situation any worse.

 

[linkin]

You could get an internal SATA drive. No annoying big cable.

External ones are generally slower, too.

My guess is that the drive is old/dying or doesn't read dual layer discs, or doesn't like either + or - discs.