Disabling secondary IDE device help

My CD/DVD drive has been playing up lately, it used to read 75% of my music/DVD/CDROM disks but in the past week it has stopped reading anything other than audio files on blank CDs.

I went fiddling with the Primary and Secondary devices (changing from DMA If Available setting to PIO Only) but it didn't help and I have read that with Windows that if you get enough I/O Device Errors (when the CD Drive can't recognise the format of the disk) that it resets your secondary IDE device and you have to uninstall and reinstall it on your laptop. Any hints, tips or solutions before I go messing with this would be greatly appreciated lads

check out the bios settings and see if it is still being read there. thats a start.

if that doesn't work i suggest buying a new PC.

Building a new house when the door wont open is always the best possible solution.

You can remove uninstall the drive by using control panel->system->hardware->device manager->CD/DVD Drives-Drive name right click and choose Uninstall.

A reboot should see the OS detect it and reinstall it.

Paul's probably right though. Time to get a shiny new one.

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Originally Posted by jebus

My CD/DVD drive has been playing up lately, it used to read 75% of my music/DVD/CDROM disks but in the past week it has stopped reading anything other than audio files on blank CDs.

I went fiddling with the Primary and Secondary devices (changing from DMA If Available setting to PIO Only) but it didn't help and I have read that with Windows that if you get enough I/O Device Errors (when the CD Drive can't recognise the format of the disk) that it resets your secondary IDE device and you have to uninstall and reinstall it on your laptop. Any hints, tips or solutions before I go messing with this would be greatly appreciated lads

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My hard drive some how got in PIO mode and caused problems ie very
slow performance. I have it back in DMA now and it is fine.
I would suggest maybe the lens on the drive needs cleaning?
Either with a cleaning disk or perhaps you can get access to it with
a cotton bud. Might be time to investing a new drive.
You might even consider getting an external USB drive, you can get a
500GB one for about £60, that would hold as much as 100 DVD's which is
comparable to the cost of a new DVD drive and 100DVD's, however it is so
much more flexible easy to use and reliable. However if it does fail you lose
the lot. I have had 2 CD drives fail on me. Now I have a nice neat drive
the size of a book, no big box full of CD's to sort through, no coasters either.
They are not as fast as internal drives but they are fast enough to play music and video.