Why did my optical drives stop reading some DVD and CD disks?

I just bought a couple of new games. One on a PC DVD-ROM and one on a PC CD-ROM.

I had just finished watching a few rented DVD movies on my PC DVD drives, a pair of IDE Liteon drives, so I had no reason to suspect what was about to happen. I put the newly bought PC DVD=ROM game into a drive and nothing happened. Then an error box appeared saying "The disk in drive x is not formatted. Do you wish to format it?" Huh!!!???!!! I tried the newly bought PC CD-ROM and the same thing happened!!! Both Liteon drives did the same thing. Thinking it was maybe a bad IDE cable, I next plugged in my external USB Plextor drive. The same things happened with the external USB drive again.

So next I tried a couple of "old well known" PC DVD-ROM disks. I put my Oblivion PC DVD-ROM disk into the Liteon drives and IT WORKED PERFECTLY! I next put in my Dark Messiah Might and Magic PC DVD-ROM disk and it DID NOT WORK! But I had installed the game from that very disk a year or so ago and played many a time with that required disk in the drive!!!

Next I put the new PC CD-ROM into the CD drive on my win98se computer. The new CD was read perfectly from the CD drive on the win98se computer. I actually copied the files over the LAN from that CD drive to the other computer running win2k and installed the game that way. (Could not do the same with the DVD disk on the CD drive.)

I'm puzzled. What happened? Why won't any of my drives read the new disks? Why did my drives stop reading a disk it used to read? What can I do to fix it?


??? ???

Here's a shot of Nero Info Tool.

The DVD-ROM is supposed to work in my brand new just bought DVD drive. But it doesn't work in this drive either. I thought it might have been a new file system only new firmware could read.

So why does my computer not read it and why can I not install my new game from the DVD-ROM?

Maybe a bad disk? Try unistalling the drives in the device manager and rebooting computer and let windows install the drives again. Worth a shot.

Have you checked for Device Filters? See my post here:

http://club.cdfreaks.com/f44/sony-dv...3/#post2091506

Thanks SuperHero!

Thanks for the replies.

I uninstalled the drives and re-booted a few times. No change.

The disks are fine. The are read fine in another computer.

I just restored a ghost image of my operating system partition. All works fine now. I must have done something over the holiday weekend to hose my optical drives. I thought I was doing good deleting those files in the Documents and Settings folder. Cleaning things out.

Still, I wonder exactly what did I delete that was needed.

Glad to hear you fixed it. Take care.