CD/DVD Rom not auto-starting unless I F5 it

Ronny Booth · 19 May 2016

Hello Forum,

I've got a Dell Inspiron 3650 running Windows 10 with a TSSTcorp DVD+-RW SU-208GB.

Try as I might to tweak the Autostart settings, whenever I insert a CD or DVD into the drive it will not play/acknowledge the disc, unless I either press F5 to refresh, or go to This PC and click on the DVD drive icon. Once that's done, it works fine and I can see the files on the CD. It's as is the PC's not picking up that there's a disc in the drive, even though the disc revolves and the green light comes on, after a minute or so it winds down without the PC acknowledging it.

Did anyone else have this problem and, hopefully, resolve it?

Here's device/driver info should it help:
PNP Device ID SCSI\CDROM&VEN_TSSTCORP&PROD_DVD+-RW_SU-208GB\4&2BF059D2&0&010000
Driver c:\windows\system32\drivers\cdrom.sys (10.0.10586.0, 169.50 KB (173,568 bytes), 30/10/2015 07:17)

Any help appreciated, thanks (and sorry if this old news - first-time poster and all that...)
Ron

NavyLCDR · 19 May 2016

My wife's laptop had that problem with a TSSTcorp DVDRW drive. Windows would not detect any disc inserted in the drive at all, but did detect the drive itself. A $15 replacement drive - not TSSTcorp - from EBAY fixed it.

Scottyboy99 · 19 May 2016

I think Windows 10 is glitchy on optical media. MS seems to forget that DVD and bluray are still widely used (still fuming at the way they brutally ripped out native DVD playback). Anyway check out this thread. The post by Dalchina at the bottom may bring salvation although I haven't tried it myself and mine is an LG bluray drive. I have the same kind of issue but as long as I keep anydvd in the tray at startup the issue goes away. It's as if it keeps the optical drive in Windows active if that kind of makes sense.

Optical drive auto play glitch - Windows 10 Forums

the fix mentioned relates to a hot key script. Unfortunately I wouldn't know how to use or implement it. Maybe you do. Or else if you post on that thread Dalchina could elaborate more - he is a respected and highly valued contributor to the forums so I'm sure will be happy to explain

dalchina · 19 May 2016

@Ronny Booth Hi, Autorun is different to Autoplay.. do you mean Autorun here?
windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-vista/Whats-the-difference-between-AutoPlay-and-autorun

If you want Autoplay to work and you have all the settings right but it doesn't, what I did was write a tiny script (see link above) and that script is in a text file e.g.

PollDVDdrive.ahk

Install Autohotkey (just search, free).

Now put a shortcut to PollDVDdrive.ahk in your Startup folder
(haha - which you can't find easily in the Win 10 start menu, but can in legacy compatible start menus e.g. Classic Shell) and it should work.

You can try it just by double clicking PollDVDdrive.ahk
The loop represents negligible overhead.
This also ensures explorer updates to represent the drive content.

(Autohotkey allows you to compile the *.ahk script files to create an exe file)

It seems absurd to have to do this, but it seems there's sthg easily broken here in Win 10 or perhaps defective.

Ronny Booth · 19 May 2016

Thanks for this clever workaround, Dalchina. I installed Hotkey and created your script, setting it up in Task Scheduler rather than Startup (purely to keep it simple for myself), and this has worked a treat. There's clearly something going on whereby the drive status is not being queried/reported at all by the operating system. But anyway, this'll do for me, thanks again!

dalchina · 20 May 2016

Glad it works! Hope we get a proper fix or someone works out what to do to fix it properly. Flash drives don't autoplay for me but I've never relies on autoplay anyway.. ever since I turned it off for good having found pretty well all of my Chinese students' flash drives were infected.