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Computer Repair with Diagnostic Flowcharts
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Copyright 2012 by Morris Rosenthal
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DVD Drive Troubleshooting For Music, Movies and Data
Warning! You must unplug your ATX power supply from the wall before working inside the case.
DVD recorders have replaced read-only DVD drives in all but the cheapest PCs and CD recorders have all but vanished from production computers. The flowchart below is for troubleshooting the playback function of these drives, one of 17 hardware troubleshooting flowcharts from "Computer Repair with Diagnostic Flowcharts Revised Edition." The diamond decision shapes in the chart are linked to expanded text explanations from the book, which also includes a flowchart for troubleshooting DVD recording issues.
CD and DVD Drive Diagnostic Flowchart
The most obvious DVD drive failure is when the tray won't eject. Some older CD drives and recorders didn't use a tray, you just stuck the disc in the slot and it was grabbed by the mechanism and mounted, but I haven't seen that system used on many DVD drives. If the tray (or disc) doesn't eject when you hit the eject button, take a minute away from the computer then come back and press the button one time, sharply. Don't keep your finger on it or intentionally hit it multiple times or you'll be sending it staggered "open" and "close" commands and it will just get confused. Drives that are spun up take a little extra time to spin down before they'll eject the disc, and keep in mind the drive is locked in software while it's operating. Some people get used to using the software controls in Media Player to eject when playing DVD movies or music CDs, and they forget there's a manual eject button on the drive. If you've just built a new PC or installed a new drive, make sure you secured the drive with the short screws that should have shipped with it. If you use longer screws that happen to have the right thread, they could go in too deep and jam the mechanism on a poorly designed drive. And of course, you want to double check that the power lead to the drive is firmly seated.
Shut down the PC, reboot, and try again. If rebooting doesn't help, shut down again and on the next power-on cycle, check whether the drive shows up in CMOS Setup. If the drive isn't found by the BIOS and reported in CMOS Setup, you've got a hardware problem beyond a simple stuck tray, and you should move to the troubleshooting flowchart for ATA drive failure.
Before you conclude that the problem is a mechanical failure of the drive or a disc that jumped the spindle and jammed the drive, we want to eliminate the possibility it's locked by the operating system. If you can get the drive tray to eject with the manual button as soon as the PC powers up, before Windows loads, it's a sure sign it was locked in software. If there's an activity LED on the drive which shows it's reading a disc and the eject button doesn't stop that activity, it's not going to work. You can try the software eject command through "My Computer" on Windows systems by right-clicking on the DVD or CD drive and selecting "Eject."
After you've gone through the previous steps, and assuming the DVD drive shows up in CMOS Setup and Windows, the failure really is a stuck tray. Turn off the power and check for an emergency release pinhole on the face of the CD or DVD drive. The ideal tool for activating the emergency release is a length of paper clip, the heaviest gauge paper clip you can find that fits in the hole without forcing it. Slide the straightened length of wire into the hole and by the time it goes a half inch, you should feel it pushing in the release. If you're lucky, the tray will pop open a little. Other times the release only unlocks the tray, and you have to gently pull it out. If the tray doesn't want to move more than a tiny fraction of an inch after the release is activated,or if the plastic face of the drive seems to bulge out as you pull, you'll have to take the DVD drive out of the PC, remove the faceplate, and see if the CD jumped the tray and hung up on it.
Do you feel the whole PC shaking when the DVD drive spins up? Does the CD or DVD drive make a rumbling or buzzing noise? All 5.25" drives, whether DVD recorders or simple CD players, need to be secured with four screws and mounted level in the system. The newer drives operate at such high speeds that even a light disc will cause it to vibrate badly if the disc is unbalanced due to mounting off center or the disc itself being unevenly weighted, often by an add-on label. Eject the disc, inspect it, and if it looks OK, center it in the tray to make life easier for the spindle, and try again. Don't keep using a drive that vibrates no matter what disc you put in it. Aside from potentially damaging the discs, it isn't good for the whole PC to get vibrated, which will lead to connections loosening up. If you isolate the vibration problem to one or two discs, the problem is the discs, but otherwise it's time to replace the drive.
Do music CDs play through your speakers? If the system won't play the Windows rush or sound from the Internet when you boot up, switch to the sound troubleshooting flowchart. But if the sound problem is limited to playing music CDs (including in DVD drives), there are only a few possibilities. The most obvious issue is that the CD drive may be muted in the operating system mixer. If your drive has an audio jack on the faceplate, try a pair of headphones to see if you get sound. Otherwise, you'll have to trust Media Player or whatever software you use to play CDs to show that time is elapsing and the tracks are advancing. New drives all use DAE (Digital Audio Extraction) to get the sound from music CDs and the drive properties in Windows will tell you whether digital audio playback is supported and enabled.
For older CD and DVD drives, whether they are SATA or older IDE drives, a separate stereo audio cable had to be strung from the back of the drive to the sound card to play music CDs. The drive actually had a built in D/A converter and played the music CD at the same 1X speed used by stereo equipment. Check that this 3 or 4 wire cable is connected to the back of the drive on the one end and the sound card or motherboard sound controller on the other end. If it's a new build, you'll also have to make sure that you chose the right connection points, because the thin connectors are unkeyed and can be forced onto just about any set of pins. If you have two DVD drives, or a DVD recorder and a separate player, or any combination of DVD and CD drives in the system, it may be that only one of them will have the audio patch cable, and that's the one you should play music CDs in.
If DVD movie discs that play on your TV won't play on your PC, it usually means there's a software problem with the CODEC (Coder/DECoder). Don't assume a given DVD disc is good because it's new or you just got it in the mail from NetFlix, check for yourself that it plays on the TV. Sometimes your PC media player will report an error message that the screen settings (resolution, number of colors) are wrong for a particular movie DVD, which will prevent it from trying to play. Your player software might also lack the particular decoder (CODEC) for that disc. I remember one instance where the movie player software received an automated update after which a movie that played fine a few weeks before was no longer supported. There are plenty of Internet pirates selling CODECs for movie players, but if you search for the manufacturer of the software that came with your PC or drive, you should be able to get an updated version for free. The movie industry is always experimenting with copy protection schemes which may make some movie discs unplayable in computer drives (versus entertainment DVD players) even though you aren't trying to copy them. In radical cases, your DVD player might require a firmware update to play newer Hollywood studio movies, which can only come from the drive manufacturer .
Do you have trouble recording DVD or CD discs? See the troubleshooting flowchart for CD/DVD recording problems. If you have trouble reading or booting a retail disc in a recorder, continue here. The funny thing is it's getting harder to tell real manufactured (pressed) discs from recorded discs due to the fancy labeling software and direct on disc printing options available for recorded discs. It used to be obvious because discs pressed in factories had a silver read surface while recorded CDs were gold or green, but but some companies have taken to producing short runs of DVDs with recorders and packaging them like factory discs.
Does the DVD drive read the volume information for the disc? As soon as you mount a disc in a drive and it spins up, the drive should report the volume information, title, capacity, type of disc, in Windows. You should also be able to view the disc contents through My Computer or Explorer. At this point in the troubleshooting flowchart, it doesn't matter if you can install the software or play the disc, only that the drive is reporting that it can see the DVD or CD contents.
Does the PC fail to boot operating system DVDs or known good rescue CDs that have boot tracks? Make sure you try changing the CMOS Setup boot sequence so that the DVD drive or CD drive you are trying to boot from is the first drive in the boot sequence. It shouldn't be necessary if you've just installed a new hard drive that hasn't been made bootable yet, but sometime the BIOS sees a bootable device where one doesn't really exist, so the order trumps appearances. In the old days, it wasn't that uncommon to find CD or DVD drives that took so long to spin up that they missed the BIOS request for bootable media at power on. That where opening and closing the drive to initiate spin up and hitting the old reset button used to work, but it's really a legacy issue.
Does your PC include both DVD and CD drives? Dumb as it sounds, I see plenty of those PCs still in use and you're never going to get anywhere trying to read a DVD in a CD drive. Back when DVD recorders were still expensive, some manufacturers sold CD recorders that could read but not record DVD discs, which confused the pants off a lot of people. For problems reading recorded discs, skip to the troubleshooting flowchart for recording issues.
Are you sure you put the disc in the right drive? When a PC has two physical drives, watch the LEDs on the drives to make sure the operating system is actually trying to read the drive you put the disc in. I once opened up a PC to check the connections because I had been fooled by the labels (D: and F:) pasted on the faceplates of the drives, which didn't actually agree with how the operating system saw them.
Did you try a selection of different DVD discs in your DVD drive, or CD discs in your CD drive? Try the drives with a variety of factory stamped discs. If some discs work and other discs don't, the problem much more likely the discs than the drive. Visually inspect the discs for obvious scratches, abrasions, stains or fingerprints. I use a bit of flannel shirt to clean discs, whatever you use for eye glasses should work fine. Just remember that the disc surfaces are plastic so you can't use any chemical cleaning agents that might melt in. If there are deep scratches on the label surface of the disc, they can distort the other surface to the point of making it unreadable. Always try your discs in another player before throwing them away.
Does the operating system show that the drive is installed? Check My Computer in Windows for the drive or see the installed hardware in Control Panel > Device Manager. If the drive appears in CMOS Setup but not in the operating system, get the latest version of the driver software from the manufacturer website and try installing it according to instructions. If the drive boots an operating system disc but the drive doesn't show up when the operating system boots from the hard drive, it's definitely an software driver issue. There may be a firmware update for operating system compatibility of the drive available through the manufacturer, but this really shouldn't come up unless you just upgraded to a new operating system version or bought a drive that's been sitting in a warehouse for quite a while. I never had any faith in cleaning kits for DVD or CD drives, but they aren't that expensive so I wouldn't blame you for trying one.
If your system is new enough for the DVD recorder to be SATA, there won't be any cabling issues or Master/Slave setting to worry about. If it's a new build, about the only thing you can get wrong is attaching the SATA cable to a motherboard RAID controller rather than a standard SATA connector. If the drive powers up OK and spins discs but won't read anything, the best thing to do is check it in another system with SATA support.
There is always the chance for a conflict or Master/Slave jumpers being set wrong on older ATA drives using ribbon cables for data. You can quickly try moving the DVD drive to the secondary controller if it's been set as Slave to the boot hard drive on the primary controller, but otherwise, you should see the troubleshooting flowchart for ATA drive failure.
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