Thinkpads Forum

Hi Fellow Thinkpadders -

Here's my problem ... my son played with my x31 and now I can't read or write to my cd-rom drive. I'm also having problem playing dvds also.

I have x31 w/XP Pro and matshita cd/dvd drive on dockstation.

Can someone tell me where and how to get new drivers???

Thanks again.

is the drive listed in the device manager? if so, does it have an "!" tagged to it?

Hi -

Yes ... my matshita dvd/cd-rom drive is listed in window's device manager and the device status = this device is working properly.

So ... windows thinks the drive is fine. And it was working fine before my son messed around with the laptop.

How do I know if the drivers are ok?

don't know... but windows thinks the drivers are ok, since it's not showing an error in dev mgr.

have a look at the driver tab in dev mgr and confirm that the driver provider is microsoft. if so, you could uninstall the device, from dev mgr, then shut down and reboot to let windows re-enumerate the drive.

i don't know of any separately-available drivers.

Assuming that you have tried a cold-boot (powering completely off and then back on again) and that hasn't helped, then I would suspect a physical problem with the drive itself. Is it possible for you to swap in a different drive? If not, then perhaps you can download this program:

http://www.dvdinfopro.com/

You can download the program for a 14-day free trail and run the CRC test on various media (CDROM, CDRW, DVD) and see if there's any problems.

I've installed dozens of different M a t s u s h i t a, Pioneer, HLDS, Teac and other optical drives in various Thinkpads under Windows XP and I've never run into a driver issue. Yes, sometimes Windows' "Safely Remove Hardware" wizard does not know that there's a drive installed, but Explorer will see it and the drive is usable.

Hi -

I have another thinkpad x32 with similar docking station and cd-rom drive. I switched the docking stations and the cd-rom/dvd drive works fine in the x32.

Also ... before my son messed with the x32, it was working fine (like 3-days ago). It does seem like ages ago. oh well ... kids!!!

So ... the drive is physically working. ALSO on the x31, when I put in a DVD movie, I have to go into win explorer and click on the d drive to play a movie.

Before the incident, when you put a dvd movie in, Windows XP would automatically start the dvd movie.

SO ... I have 2 problems:
1. for dvd movies, I have to manually click on the d: drive icon to play a movie

2. for cds, when I click on the d: drive, nothing happens. I can't read or write to the cd-rom drive.

I think the problems are:
1. driver corrupted and/or
2. registry messed up and/or
3. settings were changed in config.sys or autoexec.bat files

----

If I uninstall the cd-rom drivers and let winXP reinstall the drivers ... are there things that I should do to protect myself???

Oh ... I did create a system restore point

Thanks again.

Hi -

Thanks in advance for helping.

I just created a restore point.

I also installed dvdinfoPro and ran the test on a cd and dvd movie.
The results are:

- "Drive Supported Read Features" are green ... that's good I guess.

- "Drive Supported Write Features" are red for:
CD-R, CD-RW, CD SAO/RAW, CD TAO, Defected Management, Buffer Underrun, Test Write

- "Drive General Features" are blue-colored .. is that good or bad?
for following: ISRC Read, UPC Read, CSS/CPPM, Streaming, Power Mgt, MultiSession

What should I do now?