The Song Fight Bulletin Board

Music, software, movie, and text/mixed content cd's and dvd's are all being read as blank by my laptop's cd drive. Hardware profiles show no problems, and there aren't any new drivers available on windows update.

I only just noticed this as I'm on a new hard drive again, as my crap-ass Fujitsu likes to overheat and burn drives/controllers. I don't think I've had this problem on any of my previous hard disk installs.

Another funny thing is that the burner still works. I can burn a cd, after which my computer will tell me it's blank. I can take it out and put it in my playstation, however, and it will play fine.

I don't have my windows restore discs with me, but I'll see if I can get anything useful off of it.

Ideas?

How old is the laptop? Laptop CD drives never seems to last very long; could be just dying of old age.

It's about 3 years old. A new laptop is high on my list of studio purchases, but for right now this is a particularly annoying issue.

Blow on it.

Go to device manager and remove the drive, then reboot and let it re-detect it. If that fails to solve anything, try the same thing with the actual IDE channels (you'll have to boot in safe mode to do this, press F8 repeatedly as soon as you turn the computer on until you get the windows selective startup screen)

99 times out of 100, this will fix CD/DVD drive issues in Windows.
Or the drive is fucked, but if you can still burn with it, I find that hard to believe.

i've had 5 or 6 dvd/cd burners in a row with these symptoms over the last couple of years. i throw them away and get a new one.

Man, you are so right, blue. I have never owned a CD burner that worked properly for more than a couple of weeks.