Pioneer A05 wont read/recognise DVD's

[bmon]

Greetings! my pioneer dvr A05 wont read dvd's. when i pop in a dvd, and try double clicking on the dvd icon in explorer, it asks me to insert a disk (thus not recognising disk). it reads cd's flawlessly though (both audio and data). what could be the problem? i've flashed the bios and nothing has changed. my operating system is Windows XP professional.
Thank you.

[NooNoo]

Welcome to Windrivers bmon

When you say you flashed the bios, did you mean the firmware of the A05 or the bios of the motherboard?

Has the dvd side of things ever worked? What type of dvd are you trying? This drive is -r or -rw only.

[bmon]

Hi NooNoo...Thank you for the welcome and for your reply. I flashed the A05's firmware. And the dvd i was trying to read was a video dvd. It is an original DVD video that worked on my home theatre DVD player.

[NooNoo]

Has this drive ever played a dvd?
Have you installed the motherboard drivers for your machine?

[sixBlade]

I have the same problem with my Pioneer DVD-115, it reads only CD's and doesnt recognise the dvd's in the drive. I have ASPI installed and I even updated the firmware of the drive to latest but it still doesnt work for dvd's.

I am also running windows xp, dvd drive is on its own IDE cable with no other drives daisy chained.

Mobo: ASUS A7v333
768mb Crucial Memory
2400+ athlon
radeon 9700 pro

Also latest hyperion (mobo chipset) drivers are installed, and latest drivers for everything else :)

Theres apparently no such thing as a pioneer-made driver for their DVD drives, except for crappy dos ATAPI drivers.

DMA is enabled on all drives and in the bios.

Oh and I use winDVD platinum 5. (and media player classic to actually watch dvd's in.)

[NooNoo]

I have the same problem with my Pioneer DVD-115, it reads only CD's and doesnt recognise the dvd's in the drive. I have ASPI installed and I even updated the firmware of the drive to latest but it still doesnt work for dvd's.

I am also running windows xp, dvd drive is on its own IDE cable with no other drives daisy chained.

Mobo: ASUS A7v333
768mb Crucial Memory
2400+ athlon
radeon 9700 pro

Also latest hyperion (mobo chipset) drivers are installed, and latest drivers for everything else :)

Theres apparently no such thing as a pioneer-made driver for their DVD drives, except for crappy dos ATAPI drivers.

DMA is enabled on all drives and in the bios.

Oh and I use winDVD platinum 5. (and media player classic to actually watch dvd's in.)

Welcome to Windrivers sixblade
Is the ide cable 40 or 80 wire? Have you tried turning off dma?

DVD and CDrom devices are IDE devices, same as your hard drive. The driver you install to run your hard drives runs the cd/dvd drive.

This dvd drive is quite old.... it is possible that it has partially died. You could try a firmware update available form pioneer (http://www.pioneerelectronics.com/pna/article/0,,2076_4249_47048,00.html#Firmware)

[sixBlade]

Welcome to Windrivers sixblade
Is the ide cable 40 or 80 wire? Have you tried turning off dma?

DVD and CDrom devices are IDE devices, same as your hard drive. The driver you install to run your hard drives runs the cd/dvd drive.

This dvd drive is quite old.... it is possible that it has partially died. You could try a firmware update available form pioneer (http://www.pioneerelectronics.com/pna/article/0,,2076_4249_47048,00.html#Firmware)

Thanks for the welcome :) I guess it could have died.. may have to put my old one back in I guess..

I couldn't tell you if its 40 or 80 wire.. how would i tell? my guess is that its 40 wire since thats about how many i can count from left to right on the cable.

I'll try turning off DMA in the morning and let you know if that works.

One more thing I'd like to add.. as well as CD's it seems to read one single DVD that I have but none of the others.. which is whats really got me confused now. A few days ago it was reading all of them and now only reads the single dvd, before and after the firmware update. It is on the latest firmware now. (1.33)

[NooNoo]

here is a close up of an 80 wire cable (http://garryharrop.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/images/DSCF0003.JPG)