CD/DVD COMBO DRIVE ONLY READS DVD's

[randyn41]

Hi everyone!

I've got a Toshiba "Satellite 2675DVD" laptop with a toshiba "sd-c2302" cd/dvd rom combo drive. I'm using Win98se.

Until last night it worked perfectly, but now it'll only read DVD's. CD's of any type (burned, OEM, music, etc) aren't being properly read at all, and when in My Computer or Windows Explorer it shows that there's a blank disk in the drive when anything but a DVD is inserted. DVD's are read and played perfectly. I use Cyberlink PowerDVD 6 to play them.

Oh, data other that the movies on DVD's is read too. I put in a DVD with some bundled software on it and it auto-played and would (if I let it) load the software from the disk to my harddrive. Put in a regular CD though, and nothing.

According to Toshiba, there's no special driver used to opperate their cd/dvd drives. Well, I found several on Driverguide and some other driver websites and tried them all with no better results, so I re installed the generic windows one. Still only DVD's......

The only change I made anywhere before this started was to use the diagnostic tool that came w/PowerDVD to enable(?) DMA, but I went back and un-checked the DMA box to make it the same as before. Still nothing.

MS Knowledge Base has nothing for Win98 anymore, but I found 2 articles about similar problems with Win2000 and WinXP. They both say to remove a certain registry entry but the paths are different than in Win98. Soooo, I did some snooping and found the correct registry key.

For Win98 users, it's in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE > SYSTEM > CURRENTCONTROLSET > SERVICES > CLASS > {4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318} ..

I deleted it and rebooted but the drive still only reads DVD's.

If anyone can offer some advice, it would be much appreciated!

Thanks in advance,

Randy

[LLXX]

I think this is more of a hardware problem. DVD+CD drives have two optical heads, one for DVD and the other for CD. The one for CD may be out of alignment or broken. This explains why it has turned into a DVD-only drive. If you cannot boot from a CD either then that affirms the problem.

Edited March 24, 2006 by LLXX

[randyn41]

Thanks for the reply.

I got frustrated last night and re-formatted the HD and put Win2k on it. Everythings fine now.

Thanks again for your help,

Randy