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Baber1962

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DVD drive not reading certain discs

I have two dvd drives one is an iomega and the other a pioneer, both are dvd -/+ rw drives. When I insert a movie dvd in my drive, the drive light blinks as it tries to read the dvd and then it just stops. Looking in explorer it shows the drive as being empty without the title of dvd which has been inserted. However, when I tried dvd on friends PC it worked fine without any problems. Is the reason due to any of the following: (1) that I have two different firmwares on my PC? (2) do I need to check any jumper cables inside my pc?

I have tried cleaning the dvd drives with a lens cleaner but to no avail ...

I have an px915 p/g motherboard with a 128mb pci express graphics card.
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Callandor
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bthomasian

Is there a chance that these are Double Layer DVD's? I know in the past with a burned DVD that was Duel Layer, only my DVD DL could read the data and not my plain run of the mill single layer DVD+/-R player.
If these are commercial disks then your drive may be bad or need a firmware upgrade.

If not, then it is likely that your drive just doesn't like the brand disk that is being used.  It is not an uncommon problem for a drive to prefer certain brands of disks.  These problems are more likely if you use the cheap bulk disks.  In general the higher quality disks (like HP) are more likely to work across different drives.
Baber1962,

Just to add a comment to what has already been said I have also seen this happen in drives (cd or dvd rom drives) that were going bad.  The laser(s) in most current drives are very versatile and work with even the inexpensive, bulk media but as they loose alignment or start to fail then it could affect just certain discs.

b0lsc0tt
good point b0lsc0tt !

Thanks, my main work desktop is no longer used to "test" the in-house CD's that we make for this very reason.  I don't miss it at all. :-)
It is very likely that a DVD cut on the Iomega will not be read by the pioneer.  The type of DVD the Iomega burns is not readable by every DVD, it is just a difference in sector encoding, and is not unusual.
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thanks guys

In response to callendor
I will give this a try as it seems I have tried almost everything else.

In response to bthomasian
Both dvd drives have no problem with dual layer discs, I have tried other dual layer discs which work fine in both drives.


In response to arthurjb
Both dvd drives have the latest firmware. I got online to the guys at Iomega and they guided me to get the latest firmware update from the drive. At the time I didn't realise I was using cheaper quality discs but when I tried well known makes such as verbatim, TDK the Iomega drive works fine.

In response to b0lsc0tt
I doubt whether the drives are bad as they have no problems with most discs. Last week for example I brought a brand new dvd movie -Battle of Britain- tried it in my pc it didn't work in either drive, yet tried it in my friends computer it worked fine without any problems.

In response to scrathcyboy
Interesting idea but as I said both drives are dvd-/+ rw and I am able to read discs written on the iomega in hte pioneer and vice versa.