I am rebuilding a second machine of mine. I had to put back on Vista. I eventually am going to get a copy of windows 7 for it from school. But before I do that I have one unresovled issue. It is a Dell XPS420 and it has a Optiarc DVD+-RW AD-5170S ATA Device [Optical drive]. It is being seen by vista, I can even hear the cd spinning in the drive. but it is not coming back with any information off any cd or dvd, both home made and out of the box cd\dvd. Even if I boot up with a bootable cd it does not give the opting to boot off of it. I suspect maybe the laser portion of it is not working. But before I spend money I don't have to replace the drive I am looking for any suggestions for what I may be missing. I have gone and opened it up and reseated both the data and the power cable for the drive. thanks
Is the DVD drive set to be the boot drive in the PC setup? Or, on a lot of Dells, pressing F12 at boot will give you a menu to pick the boot device you want to use.
yes it is set to boot. It is set to boot before the hard drive. Also once up shouldn't it be able to read data off of a cd/dvd?
Have you done a complete Vista update since you loaded the O/S? By complete, I mean, it takes manually running the win update over and over till it returns no new updates.
yes I have. The only things I did not install were optional stuff for BING which I won't install. But it keeps failing on: Update for windows vista kb929777
honestly with today's prices why bother, just buy a new one. Here you go, $12.99 new in the box with a 12 month warranty. http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=8020886&CatId=89
okay silly question. I am use to the grey data cable. I have one for the hard drive. But the dvd\cd rom has the thin red cable. Is that called 'firewire"? It is right next to the power cable. And are new dvd\cd burners use that cable now adays?
That data cable as you described it is a SATA cable. Yes, IDE drives have been left behind and most hard drives and CD/DVDs use SATA connectors now.
