Stewart said:
My desktop has 2 disk drives; the top one "E" is CD only while the lower
"F" is my DVD drive.
My problem arises when I try to burn a movie to a DVD or copy a DVD.
The software I have (have several) does not seem to recognize the "E"
drive as that for DVDs, they keep trying to select the "E" CD drive.
I could open up the computer and try changing over the cables but I do
no think that they are long enough so I would have to take out each
drive and reposition them.
Does anyone know if it is possible from the BIOS to change the
priorities of these drives and make the current "F" DVD drive become "E"
DVD.
Thank you
There are so many questions you could ask in this case.
One thing is, things like a "Nero Lite" that comes with
the purchase of an optical drive, the software may be keyed
to look for that particular brand of optical drive, and the
software may choose to ignore the other drive. If you buy the
retail version of the software, it may instead choose to work
with all the drives. (I'm a cheap bastard, and so I've used
a few different Lite versions that come with the optical drive.)
Windows 7 has IMAPI Version 2 support, and that means the
OS has a certain level of support for DVD burning. It means
if you buy a third party program, it doesn't have to work quite
as hard, and maybe, it doesn't have to install UpperFilter
drivers like on older OSes. (I have no idea what this means,
except to suggest the reuse of ancient burning applications
might be counterproductive, if they do things to the OS that
are no longer necessary.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_Mastering_API
To give an example of that, if I do a test install of iTunes
on an older OS, Apple installs the GearSoftware (third party)
burning stuff. But on Windows 7, iTunes no longer installs
GearSoftware, because the Microsoft built-in capabilities
are apparently enough to get the job done.
Some applications are notorious for trashing burning
capabilities, and I really wouldn't know where to start,
except to start Googling the names of the software you've
installed. You don't even need to be using the program - a
bad program can mess things up by just being installed.
Take the list of optical burning software you have installed,
and start your Googling...
*******
To double check your assumptions about the hardware, you can use
Nero InfoTool. It's free as far as I know, as it can be
downloaded from Nero (and Eric Deppe the author, also used
to stage it on his own web site). I presume these are a couple
different versions, with the bigger one being new as of Dec. 2011.
ftp://ftp6.nero.com/tools/
InfoTool.zip 29622 KB 12/1/2011 12:32:00 PM
InfoTool.zip_ 1700 KB 9/29/2008 12:00:00 AM
I use an older version, and I can't promise how the various
versions I see on there now, would compare. This particular
picture is ancient, but at least you can see the tick boxes
showing optical drive capabilities. And when you place blank
media in the optical drive tray, you can go to the "disc" tab
and see Nero read the disc information. This tool helps confirm
your assumptions about drive type. Occasionally I run into
someone, who didn't check that first.
http://majorgeeks.com/screenshots/n/neroinftool.gif
*******
Microsoft makes tools to repair optical drive capability, but
the problem I have with this approach, is whether it does any
collateral damage or not. A tool like this, may selectively
remove UpperFilter registry entries for the optical drives
(effectively undoing the evil that one of the burner software
installers did). But then, you'd have to go back and test them,
to see which ones of them were busted. So while this may be convenient,
I prefer to understand just exactly what went wrong in the first
place. But if you're desperate, and not good at Googling, this
is an option (a "convenient hammer").
http://support.microsoft.com/mats/cd_dvd_drive_problems/
Paul
