Hello all, I am a novice to this stuff so please bare with me. I have a toshiba laptop that has a dvd/cd player. I have nero and burn dvd/cd’s before. Now all of a sudden it doesn’t recognize my dvd-r or even dvd-rw. It will only play my original dvd’s. I would put in the dvd-r or rw and it would just spin for a few seconds and just turn off. It doesn’t even recognize it. It would freeze my computer sometimes untill I eject the disc.
I have been reading all over the internet about some of the solutions and I tried a few. I have a matshiti uj-840. I have tried these so far, I uninstalled the drive…rebooted, nothing; I have uninstalled my nero and reinstalled, nothing; deleting something about the upper and lower filters; (put them back with restore) I don’t know if I need to reinstall windows xp. Someone was saying that I might have to do that. I hope not.
I hope it is not my drive because I called around and I was told that Toshiba requires ‘master’ drive only and I can’t seem to find that anywhere…only Toshiba ~$300!!
Please any help couldn’t hurt.
Wow, I thought by now I would have at least one person with some kind of advice. Well, I hope someone out there might know what the problem could be.
I don’t understand. Is this not a common problem. Am I screwed?
Anybody out there?? 
Well, I hope someone is able to point me in the right direction soon. I am going crazy here! 
[B][I]Well, I guess I will have to go to another site. This site doesn’t seem to have anyone knowledgeable.[/I][/B]
Your drive is probably broken - Matsushita’s slim DVD-RAM drive are extremely unreliable. If you don’t want to pay 300$ for a new drive you should buy some externel drive, it would cost you much less money.
Thank you for your reply. I was hoping that wasn’t going to be the first response. My only concern is if I was to end up buying an external and the same problem occurs then I would be back to square one. It plays dvd’s fine but doesn’t recognize some cd’s/ dvd-r or dvd-rw. Doesn’t sound like a settings or technical problem??
[QUOTE=frank23;2065943]Thank you for your reply. I was hoping that wasn’t going to be the first response. My only concern is if I was to end up buying an external and the same problem occurs then I would be back to square one. It plays dvd’s fine but doesn’t recognize some cd’s/ dvd-r or dvd-rw. Doesn’t sound like a settings or technical problem??[/QUOTE]
What is the brand of those “problematic” DVD-R/RWs? Maybe they are a low quality or damaged ones. However I have a bad experience with Matsushita’s slim drive and I think that the drive is your problem.
With new external (or internal, I don’t think it would be too complicated to mount it into your notebook) drive you should not have any problems with reading of DVDs.
BTW Toshiba is trying to rip you off, you can buy even internal model for much lower price than 300$ and you could mount it by yourself in a few minutes.
I have been using the same media (office depot brand DVD-RW X4 & Maxell brand dvd-r) never had problems before. I have checked online for new ones and found some around $79 but I called the company and they asked what laptop brand I had and told them Toshiba and he said it wouldn’t work because Toshiba requires ‘master’ drives. So I struck out with that because I checked all over and no one has ‘master’ UJ-840 mashita drives. So I was hoping it was a technical error somewhere that could be fixed.
An external USB/FireWire DVDRW drive would be a good choice then.
Thank you for your help.
[QUOTE=frank23;2065978]Thank you for your help.[/QUOTE]
You’re welcome. 