Combo won't play DVD's

Help! I am going crazy because up until a few days ago I had no problems with my drives. Now all of a sudden I stick a DVD in the drive and it just reads it forever and when it eventually stops there is no response. I don't get an error message or anything. Just nothing. Under My Computer it doesn't show under my DVD Drive. I have a Slimtype Combo LSC-24082K which came packaged with my laptop and Powerdvd 4.0 which also came packaged with it. I have run all spyware programs that I know and Virus protection has revealed no virus's on my computer so I don't know what's causing it and I'm at the end of my rope.
Please help me get my movies back. Thanks

anybody? Hello.

Welcome to Windrivers

Does the laptop see it in the bios setup?

Can you use a bootable cd - such as your restore cd and see if the drive is working.... once proved that it is, windows needs fixing.

If you cannot boot from the cd or the bios setup does not recognise the drive then the drive died and will need replacing.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by NooNoo

Welcome to Windrivers

Does the laptop see it in the bios setup?

Can you use a bootable cd - such as your restore cd and see if the drive is working.... once proved that it is, windows needs fixing.

If you cannot boot from the cd or the bios setup does not recognise the drive then the drive died and will need replacing.

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My drive is recognized by Bios and I can use a bootable CD. It appears that only the DVD part of the drive isn't working ecause both the audio and cd-rom part work fine.

heretic there have been loads of drives going like this. The dvd laser is separate to the cd laser and it seems the dvd laser dies.

Have you tried to clean it? there is a dos dvd player it plays slowly, but it would confirm whether it's windows that's causing the problem or whether the laser died.

Or use a data dvd and see if you can read the data folders from dos

Geesh, another one that won't read DVD's any longer. Seems there are way too many of these same failures happening. I'd like to know which "brands" this keeps happening to. I wonder if it is just certain brands, or just all of them?
BTW, cool tool Noo. Good way to test in DOS.

No luck with the dos player. I tried to get into my DVD drive and all I get is the message device not ready. It's weird because sometimes when I try to play a DVD it works fine but most times it doesn't even read it. I'll try cleaning the lens but in the meantime could you help me see if Windows is the problem? I'm running XP Home.

if you cannot access the drive in dos, then it is not a windows problem. Sorry.