optical drive not recognized by windows on old install, but works fine if I reinstall OS

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nightfly

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Jun 7, 2011
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This is a continuing problem. After a few years, windows cannot read my optical disks. There's nothing wrong with the drive, or the disks, if I move them to another machine with a more recent install of windows, they work. And when I reinstall windows on the same machine, it works fine. I'm just curious if anyone knows what part of windows deteriorates and causes this? I just don't like having to reinstall everything again if that particular machine isn't having any other problems. But this has been going on for at least 15 years now (I didn't notice if it happened previously, because I had kept on upgrading my optical drives every couple of years back in the 90's). It started with a few NEC scsi cd drives, Plextor scsi cd drivers, then a Pioneer dvd rom slot drive, the original pioneer ide 2x dvd burner (which I thought I had killed by burning so many dvd's, gave away, and it worked fin in another machine that was my first real clue that it was windows not the hardware), then more ide nec 3500 series dvd burners which were my standard for many years. It seems that there's something very wrong with whatever is inside windows code somewhere that has to work to read discs, some file must be corrupt, but when I run scans it doesn't find anything wrong with any of the files. Maybe something in the registry??. This has been going on with not only my own machines, but family and friend's over the years as well. So how about it, window's geniuses, what's going on? Anyone have any ideas? Oh, it now won't even recognize the usb optical drive either, even though another computer sees it and reads the disk fine. This particular machine has an install from 2009, and just started acting odd last winter; it wouldn't recognize the internal bluray drive, but worked fine with the usb bluray. Now it can't read that (even though other computers can read it fine).

Or do I just give up as usual, and chalk it up to windows rot?
 
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What OS?

Win-XP had a bug where it would drop CD/DVD drives like that, and there is a registry patch to fix it.
Let me know if you need that.

Are these still PATA drives?

I seem to remember some mobos that had trouble with PATA/IDE drives on their disk controllers.
Try a BIOS update for your mobo, that may help. At some point it's not worth fighting with really
old equipment though.

I have a couple of old PATA DVD burners on the shelf in case I need them to fix older systems but
I can probably toss them. The Egg has SATA DVD burners for like $20 or less shipped.


.
 
This time around it's Win7; started with the Pioneer SATA internal half height bluray drive, Asus SATA internal half height bluray drive (that one is new just out of the box), and a pair of external pioneer slim external usb drives: Nothing works. Sometimes one or both internal drives will show up in windows explorer, but if I put a disk in them, windows tells me to insert a disk, and never sees it; I can see the progress line going across from left to right on the top of the window, but when it's done, it still can't see the disk. All the drives work with other computers (and even the same computer if I change the boot OS drive, I have chenbro hotswap cages so could remedy stuff like this quick). So it's definitely something going wrong in windows itself. I just think it's so weird that it will occasionally have problems, until the point where it almost never will see the drives; at first it was the internal drive, but would see the usb drives which worked for a few months. Eventually it doesn't see any of them, but sees the hard drives and SSD's fine. So I think it's something with reading the optical files. It doesn't recognize new SATA optical drives either. Funny, I didn't think to check to see if it recognizes PATA optical drives, I have a PATA pci-e card floating around somewhere, and I have a few old PATA drives that I pulled still working before the last go round of building back when the sandybridge processors came out.

So, out of curiosity, I pulled the OS drive out, put in a blank, booted with my win7 usb stick, let it install, left network attached, even let it upgrade itself to win10, and of course, everything works. All the optical drives work fine. Shut down, replace OS drive with old win7, and again, none of the optical drives available. So it's definitely not the hardware. There's something rotten in windows. Win-alzheimers? It forgets what it's supposed to do?

But out of this, now I have a win10 OS drive to play with.
 
First, thank you for your help, but I've still not been able to figure out what the problem is. Here's the tale:

So I get home, boot up on the win 10 disk. SATA optical and usb drives all work. Shut down. Remove usb drive, remove win 10 disk. Replace with the Win 7 disk. Boots up. Now one of the ssd's is missing in explorer (should be 4). I go to disk management, it's not there; windows can't see it at all even though it's visible in the bios. Shut down and reboot. Still not there. Decide to put a disk in the SATA optical drive. Hmmm, now it works?!?!??. But I'm missing a hard drive. Shut down. Put win10 drive in. Again, it sees everything. Shut down. Remove win 10 drive, reinstall win 7 disk. Boot. Great. Now it sees all the drives, including the internal SATA optical. Reads dvd's and cd's (didn't have a handy bluray to check at the moment, but for months now it couldn't read anything at all). But now the usb optical drive still remains only halfway there; explorer occasionally (sometimes it shows up in explorere, sometimes it doesn't, and it doesn't seem to matter whether it has a disk in it or not) will see the drive but it can't read a disk; I still get the slow, grey advancing line across the explorer window as if it's reading a lot of information, and it slows down as it gets to the end, eventually stopping and still sees.....nothing in the drive. I tried the registry fix eliminating upper and lower filter lines, but to no avail. It works, it doesn't work, something else acts up, yet it's not the hardware. But at least the internal optical SATA drive is now visible and can read disks....for now, yet for no apparent reason as it started working before I made the registry changes. Odd that the SATA optical internal drive had become non working first, and the usb drive had worked for a while after that, yet, now, the usb drive is still non functional but the internal SATA drive has started working. I know the ultimate solution, and have decided that I will simply wipe it clean, and reinstall a nice fresh win 7 this weekend. But it really would be nice to be able to determine what exactly was going wrong. I've worked on physical things all my life, and it's always been nice to be able to narrow down the problem to particular pieces. But when it's something like this, and there's no way to remove a suspect piece of code and replace it with something that is known to be good and working, it's just irritating to know that the next failure could be in ten minutes, ten hours, or half a year. So I will go the wipe, repartition, format routine once again, and with nice squeeky new windows code intact, everythng will be back to normal.

Maybe I should just look at this like I do flushing the cooling system, greasing and changing the oil in my car; routine maintenance to clean out the gunk. Digital gunk. Hmm. What a great way to explain this to others. Windows fills up with digital gunk and clogs it's mind. Oh well.

Meantime, I'll use my free win10 disk, and learn all the nutty things about that OS.
 
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