Vista not recognizing disks in the drive...

[tom18230]

When I put a disk in the disk drive (windows vista 64bit) it spins up and the green light on the drive flashes.... but nothing on screen happens.

Windows recognizes the drive and I've got the drivers up to date, but it doesn't seem to recognize that there is a disk in - absolutely nothing happens on screen.

I've tried a couple of games (Lost Planet, Guild Wars, Company of Heroes), a couple of CD's (Dream Theater, Slipknot, System of a Down) and a DVD (Misery) yet none are recognized.

Anyone know what could be causing Vista to not realize a disk is in the drive?

I don't think it's autorun (autoplay or whatever) since when I put a USB Flash drive autorun.exe runs.

Any help guys?

Thanks

[TAKTAK]

can you open the disc by going into computer and double clicking on the cd drive?

[tom18230]

Nope, it doesn't appear.

When I click computer I just see the 4 partitions of my hard drive (c, d, e and f) and nothing else.

When I put a USB flash drive in, it appears in that area alongside my partitions.

I put a disk in and I can hear it spin up and the lights on the drive flash, but even when I click refresh in the computer area nothing appears and nothing happens.

[TAKTAK]

have you checked that the drives are firmly connected?

[tom18230]

I think so. My brother rebuilt it a few days ago and connected everything, but they might not be.

I'll look and get back to you.

[Lucio]

The most likely reason is the autoplay options. I've had some major headaches with Vista64 and discs, which I eventually traced back to CyberLink Power DVD trying to spin up each time it detected a disc, but falling afoul of the copy protection measures.

Disable all the options under Control Panel (set to Classic View) -> Autoplay, then restart. You should find now under Computer that the disc appears more or less straight away. From there you can try enabling the various Autoplay options to see what works best for you.

[tom18230]

Control Panel > Autoplay ... then what? Restart :S?

For games and software I have it set to "ask me every time"... so when I put a game in should it not ask me what I want to do with it automatically, and wouldn't it display in computer?

No matter how long I wait it won't display in computer.

[Splash]

is your optical drive IDE or SATA? If the former then check the jumpers on your drive. If the latter... I dunno. Does the optical drive show in the BIOS?

[tom18230]

SATA.

Thanks for the help, but I changed the SATA cable and it worked - very weird, but it got the job done. Faulty cable maybe :S?

Thanks anyway guys.

[TheReaFireblade]

SATA.

Faulty cable maybe?

Almost certainly.
The way to find out for sure though, would be to use it to connect another (known working) SATA drive - be it a HDD or another optical drive.

[yourmomm]

yep-this has just started happening to me out of the blue too-but i have a dual boot system: under windows xp, no problems with dvd/cd rom drives at all (so no faulty cables there then), but under vista 64, exactly the same problem as described above: no recognition of cd/dvd rom drives. its driving me nuts trying to solve the problem-it MUST be a software issue (?) but its not autoplay as this is completely disabled. 1000 sheckles to anyone who has any ideas? cheers yourmomm