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Hey, I have a problem with my DVD Drive (Asus DRW-2014L1T, most current firmware installed) on Windows 7 x64.

When I insert a DVD movie and Windows starts to access the drive (for autoplay, or when I manually click on the drive icon), my computer hangs up in a particular way, while trying to read the disk.

Explorer stops reacting and several programs won't run or their launch is horribly delayed (like the device manager). In th end, I can't access the movie and can't even eject the disk (probably because Windows is still trying to access it). To get the disk out of the drive I then have to reboot (which sometimes doesn't work either) and eject the disk before Windows boots.

BIOS recognizes the drive just fine, and Windows is also able to read data disks (tried it with some software disks), but just refuses any movies. I have checked the region code in the device manager, but it is correct. My notebook is reading the disks just fine btw..

I remember having the same problem with an older drive as well, but I don't remember what I did to make it work again (maybe I didn't even fix the problem back then). I do remember however that booting with the disk inserted made Windows recognize the disk, however this doesn't work in this situation either.

Do you have any idea what to do to fix that problem?

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  • Could it be some sort of region blocking?
    – Nifle
    Commented Jan 16, 2011 at 17:07
  • I checked multiple (german) movies, which should work here in Germany. The drive is set to region code 2 (Europe), so it really should work.
    – poke
    Commented Jan 16, 2011 at 17:10

2 Answers 2

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It could be that your DVD drive is having trouble reading DL DVD's (often movie DVD's are DL DVD's)

Try burning a video dvd(Single layer) from another computer and check if its being read.

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I have seen similar problems a few times in the past, and it has always been one of two things.

  1. Optical Drive broken or damaged.
  2. Bad application that was intercepting various system operations.

For one, the only solution is to replace the drive.

For two, I would first try safe mode, although that may not actually allow you to play the movie, it should show if it is a third party application that was blocking it from launching. I haven't see this for some years, but on Windows XP, there was a virtual CD application (forget the name now) and a viewer application (Think it may of been WinDVD), which just caused problems such as what you are seeing.

Lastly, if all else fails, I would personally try a Linux live disk of some sort (hopefully someone else can recommend one) Ideally that supports USB so you can test the optical drive (Most Live CDs run from the optical drive, so you wouldn't be able to test).

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  • I don't really believe that it is option 1 (or at least I don't want to believe it :P), so I'll try to check using what you suggested; it might take a while though, but I'll keep you updated.. Thanks so far.
    – poke
    Commented Jan 18, 2011 at 11:15

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