DVD R/W drive in Device Manager but only reads audio CD's

Hey all,

So! I recently installed Win10 ( clean 1903 - up to date ) on my Photoshop workstation. I wanted to dual boot with Win7 on a separate disk and set it up with the help of you guys - that's all fine.

What I noticed this afternoon was my DVD R/W drive was not working properly TSST SH-S183L, it's in the Device Manager and says it's working, but, it won't read anything other than Music CD's - A bit weird. I shut the system down, checked cables which were all fine and rebooted......same result.

Here's another wierd thing, I tried the drive in my dual boot Win7 O/S and the same thing is happening. OK it could be a failing drive - swapped that out and the other DVD drive is the same - no DVD reads or writes to DVDr, no acknowledgement there is a dvd film in the drive or software dvd in Win7 or Win10.

The DVD drive shows up in the BIOS ( P9x79pro ) too but my boot disks won't load either when I select the dvd as boot drive. I was going to update the bios, but, I won't until I get this fixed, as it was working yesterday.

I have tried both DVD drives in an old PC ( Vista....eeek ) and they were fine. So that would suggest this issue is related to the Win7/Win10 PC.

Any ideas as to what is going on?

Chris

If a bootable DVD doesn't work, that suggests a hardware issue, because the OS wouldn't be involved in that.

My first thought was that the red laser in the drive had died. (CD use a near-IR laser.)

However, if the drive works in a different PC, that stumps me.

Thanks for the replies....

This has the grey matter engage another gear.

Win10 and Win7 can see the two seperate drives and recognise them as a dvd RW drives- but doesn't play/open anything on that computer except audio cd. No DVD, no Boot disk, no software/games - if I double click the dvd icon with a dvd in, I get a message saying insert disk and it ejects.

If I put the same DVD drives in a different computer they're fine, all works.

I have tried deleting the drivers and reinstalling, checking for up to date drivers.......looking at regedit.

I am at a loss on this one......

- - - Updated - - -

I have given up on this...nothing works.

I have taken out the drive an freed up a SATA for another SSD. I have a usb DVD in the studio and other drives in different computers if I need them dvd's.

In case I need to reinstall Win10 I have a bootable usb drive. I accept defeat :)

USB DVD/RW with everything and as a boot drive so that'll do as a DVD solution for now.......next trick.....getting the NVMe M.2 and PCIe adaptor going on a P9x79 pro....

farrellart said:

USB DVD/RW with everything and as a boot drive so that'll do as a DVD solution for now.......next trick.....getting the NVMe M.2 and PCIe adaptor going on a P9x79 pro....

A bit of a zig, there.

I'm not sure that you can boot from an NVME drive from an X79 motherboard. It is supposed to require BIOS support. I believe that Asus seems to have never provided such a BIOS for that motherboard. (I don't think Intel supported NVME on the X79 chipset.)

I used a PCI-E M.2 drive in an adapter as a boot drive on that very motherboard, but the M.2 drive wasn't NVME.

It may be difficult to find a PCI-E M.2 drive now that doesn't use NVME. (A few years ago, NVME was rare.)

Hi bobkn,

Thanks for the heads up on the P9x79 MB

To be fair I haven't really looked in to it properly....I was seduced by some youtube videos showing someone using a PCIe expansion card and a NVMe drive which had transfer rates @ 2 to 3k....I have started to look into my motherboard's bits'n'bobs realizing I haven't really took advantage of it's spec ( despite it being many years old and a self build). I am starting to tweak......eeeerrrr.... and read the manual after all this time.