intermittent reading of dvd drive

[hotspur]

Hi everyone

I f I shut down my machine, the next day when I come to start up it does not recognize the dvd drives. If however I stop the machine and unplug the drives and then plug them in again all is ok. If I keep the machine running everything is ok. I have tried with just one dvd connected and the same problem. I have used different leads. The mobo is an MSI, and I am running xp pro

Sometimes there is power to the drives sometimes not.

But every time if I disconnect the drives and then reconnect all is ok.

Until very recently it was recognizing both drives ok.

The mobo is still under guarantee

I am completely baffled, any help will be greatly appreciated

John

[Plastic Nev]

Hi and welcome to Extreme Tech Support - Free PC Help John.

Can you turn your system on, and before doing anything to get the DVD working, have a look in device manager, click start, then run, and type or copy and paste " devmgmt.msc " (without the quotation marks)in the box. Scroll down to DVD/CD ROM if there, click the + then double click on each device shown, let us know what it says or if any yellow !! or red ??.

I also think there may be a problem with your power supply which could be dropping its voltage on start up, hence the drives not being recognised. Can you tell us the rating of the PSU and whether you have an extra graphics card in.

Edited January 11, 2009 by Plastic Nev

[hotspur]

Thank you for your reply

On boot up it shows only one device, a device which is not on my machine, a AXV cd/dvd-rom scsi cdrom device, the two which are connected are not shown.

The PSU is a winpower and the spec is :

450 watts

20A @ +12v, 40A @ +5v, 28A @ +3.3v 0.5A @ -5v 0.8v @ -12v

My graphics card is a NVIDIA GeForce 7300 le

I have two SATA hard drives

The CPU is an Intel core 2 6600 2.4 gh

I have 4 gig of memory installed

 

Thank you

[Dalo Harkin]

Make sure that the leads from the PSU - run DIRECT to the drives - dont use any of those splitters and dont have any fan crossthroughs on the same leads.

Check that the cables you are using are correct and that you have the back of the 2 drives set correctly MASTER at the TOP and the SLAVE at the BOTTOM and then connect the IDE lead.

[hotspur]

Thank you I will certainly try your suggestions.

A strange thing I have noticed is that if I have the DVDs working and I shut the machine down completely for say 5 mins, it boots up OK and reads all the drives. If I leave it overnight it doesn't read them until I play around with the cables. Is it possible that temperature is affecting the system somehow? Could it be an intermittent fault on the Mobo?

Thank you for your input