mysterious DVD drive issues

[dataDude]

I bought a Samsung DVD writer recently and finally got around to replacing the DVD-RAM/CD-ROM combo drive in one of my systems. Keep in mind that before any of this, the old drive was running ok, meaning it was reading and stuff, but not to its full capability (have had it for some years now). K, I turned the PC off, disconnected everything from the old drive, put the new drive in to replace it (of course after checking the jumper) and reconnected everything. I turned the PC on, the BIOS was reading it just fine, went to Windows XP without flaw and tried to read a recently-burned known good DVD with the DVD drive. It failed, giving me the "D:\ is not accessible" error message. I thought "that's weird", and went to eject, check the status of the media itself (no flaws), and reinsert the DVD. Still got the error. Then I tried to get it to read a known good CD. Still failed. On occasion of trying this all out I won't get an error message; Windows will actually open the drive like a folder, but there are no contents in there, which I know for a fact is bogus (I test all CD's/DVD's immediately after burning them). So then I thought "great, the drive is defective or incompatible." So I put the old drive back in, noticing the IDE cable is a little gnarled, but it never gave me issues before... that I know of (reason for the old drive not running up to par?), and I have a couple of other, better IDE cable laying around. I also tried, last resort, to delete the drive from Device Manager, readd the drive, and reboot. I figured everything would work decently again now and no big deal. Wrong. The computer failed to access the old drive after restarting the PC. I rechecked to make sure the cables and stuff were fitted properly. Still no workie. So I took the old cable out and put in one of the better ones. Still won't work and I'm out of ideas.

Anybody have any of his/her own?

Specs:
Windows XP
150 GB HDD
1.5 GB RAM
Athlon64 3400+
ATI Radeon 9800 (maybe 9700, I forget, can't find box)

This is my gaming/main resource computer.

[mbiggs]

Perhaps if you burnt it in DVD-r format could that newer driver possibly not read -r and only read +r???

[dataDude]

Not exactly. This link will take you to my drive:
http://www.us.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=20099

Also, that doesn't explain why the old drive no longer works either.

The CD's I've been using are CD-R's.

[juppy]

Have you got anything else running on that same IDE header, or is the drive on there by itself? If it's by itself, and you have another IDE header, you might try plugging the drive into that other one to see if maybe you lost one of your IDE headers on the motherboard.

Only thing I can think of to try other than that would be to try burning your CD's and DVD's at a slower speed to see if that helps. My brother's laptop will do that.......burn a CD-R at 40x on his home computer, and the laptop won't read it. Burn it at 24x or slower and it reads it fine. Just a picky drive, I guess.

You said you tried a different IDE cable too.....any chance the second one might be bad as well?

[dataDude]

I also have a CD+RW drive on the same IDE cable. I keep that drive because it reads CD's faster than the DVD drive (yeah, I'm a little impatient with my software lol).

I'm familiar with the risks of burning CD's/DVD's at higher rates, so I burn my CD's at 12x and my DVD's at, well, about half the max speed offered.

But why isn't the old drive working anymore? I never had this prob with the old one.

[dataDude]

Never mind. I guess it was just a matter of time before the old drive would work again. Strange. Also, I guess in the process of changing out the drives time and time again tightened a connection and suddenly where before I was getting about 2.5x on my old drive I'm now able to get up to 10x! All righty then!

Guess this means that the new drive is either incompatible or just plain bad.

[perkster]

maybe it was the same problem and also needed more time?