Introduction

As there are lots of questions on the forum regarding optical drives that fail to recognize certain discs (be it CD(R(W)) or DVD(R(W)), we felt there was a need for a sticky topic, dealing with this very issue.

Although we can point you at some possible causes of these problems, it's always hard to tell directly what the cause is. By reading through this FAQ, you might find a solution, or possible causes for your problem. If you don't find anything useful here or questions are still left open, you are free to open a new thread about your problem. Before you do so, it might be wise to use our search to see if there are perhaps any others with the same problem, as this may lead quickly to more information or even a solution!


General problem checking


First check

As with most computerproblems, the problem can either be due to software or hardware misconfigurations or errors. If your drive has recognition problems, it's smart to check if this is due to software. The easiest way to check this, is to try to boot from your optical drive. Make sure you set your optical drive as first boot device (this can be done from your system's BIOS) and boot from the disc. Good discs to boot are OS installation discs, such as a Windows or a Linux installation CD. If this works out alright, we know that the drive works.


Hardware configuration check

• If you experience problems with your drive connected to another controller than your onboard IDE controller, please attach your drive to the onboard controller (onboard RAID give similar problems!) and see what happens.
• Check your jumper settings. Each IDE channel can have one master and one slave drive. Normally, an optical drive should be able to work in both ways, but I know from experience that this isn't always true. Some drive don't like the way they are configured and thus give problems. If your drive is having problems being slave, try to make it a master...
• Check your IDE cables. This may sound dumb, but there are loads of cases where the IDE cable that wasn't attached the right way, was the cause of all problems. Sometimes it happens that the IDE cable looks to be fitted ok, but it's not really stuck on like it should. There are even people out there, that manage to rotate the cable for 180 degrees and force the connector into the drive (this is made impossible by the form of the connector).
• The lens of your drive could be filthy. By cleaning the drive's lens (best is manually with distelled water, but most people use a regular CD/DVD lens cleaner), the problem could be gone!

Software configuration check

• IDE drivers are known to be possible causes for problems with optical drives. If you happen to have a mainboard based upon NVidia's NForce2, or an Intel chipset (Intel application accelerator)and you have NVidia's/Intels IDE drivers installed, you can do two things: upgrade to the latest version, or the best solution, uninstall them, as they are known to be troublemakers in lots of situations!
  For other situations (other chipsets), if you suspect your IDE drivers of making problems, just try to update or uninstall them!
• Faulty firmware can be another cause for all kind of troubles. What firmware is? Firmware is software that is stored in the memory of your drive. It's responsible for everything a drive does. By visiting your drive's producer's website, you should be able to download firmwares to update your drive with. If this doesn't work out for you, the CD Freaks firmware section or the RPC1.org firmware section might be of help. One little remark: if you flash your drive with non-standard firmware, most likely, your warranty will be void!
• Windows XP comes with a built-in CD writing service, called IMAPI. This IMAPI service is known to cause several problems and strange behaviour. You can turn it off by setting it to manual (start the file "services.msc" and look the IMAPI service up).
• Still no go? Well, there's another simple thing you can try: delete your drives! Just go to the Control panel, choose System -> Hardware -> Device manager and delete the optical drive from there. After a reboot, you'll see that Windows automatically re-detects the drive. Now, try again!

Some more specific problems


Drive seems to work ok, but it doens't see any writable media

In most cases, the cause for this problem is quite easy to be found: an ATIP hider is installed on your system. As some copyprotections check if the disc they are running from has an ATIP (part of a CDR(W) where disc information resides), programs like CloneCD come with an ATIP hider, to hide this ATIP from the system, making it possible to run backups. By disabling this ATIP hider (sometimes called "CDR media hider"), your problem will most probably be gone.


Drive seems to work ok, but it doens't see a certain type of media

If you have an old CD burner, or a somewhat older (or recent, but cheap) DVD burner, it might be that some formats aren't supported.
Older CD burners sometimes don't have CDRW support, so if you try such a disc in an older drive, that might be the case.
For quite a long time, DVD burners have been single format drives. This means, that they only could deal with either +R(W) media, or -R(W) media. If you try to burn to an unsupported media type, you just found the cause of your problem!


Conclusion

I sincerely hope this helps a little! If not, your drive might be defective. Before returning it to the shop, make use of whatever resource our forum offers you. I'm quite sure that most problems can be solved here, as we have a good (technical) staff and an incredible amount of knowledgable users! You also might want to check this thread, as it contains a whole bunch of links to articles in Microsoft's knowlegdebase (there are a lot of some more specific problems there!)...


Good luck!