Certain DVD's not being recognised

[dmc]

Hi,

 

I'm running a 1 year old Dell Inspiron 530, with Vista.

 

Had been having increasing issues with the PC, so decided to restore it to factory settings in an attempt to return it to normal operation.

 

This worked successfully, however, after restoring it I decided to buy an upgrade to Windows 7 today.

 

Upon insertion of the upgrade disc, the DVD drive does not recognise that a disk is present. Upon further investigation, I discovered that the drive will only recognise DVD's which I burned myself onto DVD+R discs. It will not recognise any purchased DVD's which I have. It continues to recognise CD's with no issues.

 

I've already downloaded AnyDVD so as to ensure it is not a region issue.

 

The drive is DVD-+ RW.

 

Any direction anyone can give me would be much appreciated!

 

Regards,

 

DMC.

[Plastic Nev]

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

Did it recognise and play any DVD before you did the factory restore? Do you have a drivers disk? it should have come with the machine, or if recovery disks were made when new, and should have been used during the restore process.

Have a look in device manager and see if there are any red or yellow marks by the CD/DVD drives.

to get to device manager click "start", then "Run" type or copy and paste into the box

 

devmgmt.msc

 

click ok or hit enter.

Scroll down to the DVD/CD drives and click any + next to the entry to expand to all devices of that type.

Let us know what you find.

Nev.

[dmc]

Hi,

 

Thanks for your reply!

 

Yes, it did play DVD's in the past with no issues. It still does play DVD's, but so far only ones which I burnt myself previously.

 

Device manager shows the DVD/CD drive to be working properly. I just did a driver update on it which has made no difference.

 

The info in the Device Manager is:

 

HL-DT-ST DVD+-RW GSA-H31N ATA Device

 

DVD Region = 1, although I have AnyDVD in use so the region should not matter.

 

The drive still reads DVD+R DVD's, as well as ordinary CD's.

 

Whenever I insert a DVD which does not work, I can hear the drive trying to read up, but it just never recognises that a DVD is present in the drive.

 

Have also tried a laser cleaner disc with no success.