Pioneer DVR-K16m (Vaio FE11-H)

[substance]

Major problem today! Windows recognises the dvd drive but can only read cdr's. Whenever I put a DVD in (weather a genuine film, a game, or a burned DVD) the DVR-K16m whirrs like mad and windows comes up with a blank in explorer. I've tried all kinds of things - firware updates, reinstalling drivers, system restore, rollback, u name it.

How come it reads CDr's fine and can grab data from them and transfer to the HDD but DVD's are being ignored?

Help!!!

[George.m]

Hi substance
Maybe your dvd-rom needs some clean.Try to clean it with something like this you can find it in computer and electronics stores.
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:smileygrin: merry christmas to everyone :smileygrin:

[Blencogo]

Hi substance and welcome to Club Vaio.

There are recent firmware updates for the DVR-K16 and the DVR-K16VAS drives on Vaio-Link
- not sure which suits your drive !

We have had a few problems like yours recently - I wonder if a recent MS Update is contributing to the problem?

Anyway - good advice from George.m. A different frequency laser is used for DVD and CD and it is possible that the DVD one is dirty or faulty.

Another useful trick when it works for one and not the other is to open your CD tray and carefully slide the reading head fully towards the centre and fully towards the outside. Do this a few times to ensure full and free movement - but make sure you don't put your fingers on the lens.

If you look in Device Manager are there any warning yellow triangles against the drive or does it say that the drive is working correctly? I assume it says OK as you have reinstalled the drive.

Have you installed any new DVD software recently?

[substance]

Thanks guys...

I'll try getting the lens cleaner... hopefully PC world will have it...

I installed the DVR K16 update and it accepted it.... made no difference to the problem though...

And no, there are no warnings or erors in device manager.

I thought it might be a region thing (my vaio is set to region 2 by default) but I havent messed with this yet....

I'll let you know what happens.

[substance]

OK I tried using the DVD cleaner etc.. no joy...

uninstalled/reinstalled drivers.... no joy...

System restore to working date... no joy...

Blah blah blah.. no joy

Called Sony, told em the above...blah blah blah...

They said i'd have to do a complete factory reset... but i was on hols in england (im an expat in Saudi Arabia) and i dint have an external drive to back everything onto...

They then said they could take the laptop for up to ten days to have a look at it but this may include the engineers doing a com,plete factory reset thang... and again... I dint have anything to back all my sh*t onto...

So....

I'm now back in Saudi with a crap DVD ROM and a soon to run out UK warranty... lol

Help?

ANyone?


Please?


haha

[George.m]

you can buy an external HDD(under 80mb)like this.

[Blencogo]

Hi substance,

You do not seem to be alone with this problem. None of the usual tricks seem to work so a full recovery is the only thing left to try. No one has reported a successful outcome yet.

Either borrow an external drive to back up your data or copy it all to drive D:\ and just do a drive C:\ recovery.

DVD drives are pretty reliable these days and rarely fail through a hardware fault and the problem is usually in the software/firmware somewhere. The problem is that there have been so many updates to Windows, Vaio Utilities, Adobe, Anti-Virus software, IE7, WMP11 recently, it is almost impossible to find the culprit.

If your warranty is almost over, I would try a recovery and see if replacing the original configuration works. If it doesn't, get it off to Sony. An external USB DVD drive is a handy standby to have.