DVD vanishes then is back

[BeeJ]

Win 7 Pro 64bit all up to date revs.

I have two BD drives.
Both worked OK.
One was an old drive and was missing a capability.

They are drives D: and E:

D: HLDT ST BD-RE GGW-H20L ATA
Loc 1 Ch 0 Target 1 LUN 0

EShared) PIONEER BD-RW BDR-206 ATA
Loc 0 CH 0 Target 0 Lun 0

The D: drive disappeared from Win 7 and would not respond to the front
panel button push. This went on for months.

The E: drive has always worked as expected.

This morning I was shocked to see that the D: was back in WE and
responds to the WE Eject click to open the door.

Weeks ago I went in and wiggled all the connections and I have booted
several times since then. I even tapped on the drive cases in case
something was loose.

Is there some place to look for some incompatibility in Win 7 or BIOS
or?

Also an aside, within Win there is no way to track which drive is
which.
If you click on properties in WE with a drive highlighted, the data
there does not indicate what "Hardware" tab description line refers to
the selected drive letter. I have to assume that the list of drives
"All disk drives" "Name Type" List are in order of drive letter. That
"Hardware" tab should list the drive letters. I cannot find useful
info in the "Hardware: tab "Properties" "Details".
I figured out what drive was what when I clicked on WE to eject and
also that I had one drive shared showing the shared icon. Sharing tab
says E: is shared.

 

[Char Jackson]

Win 7 Pro 64bit all up to date revs.

I have two BD drives.
Both worked OK.
One was an old drive and was missing a capability.

They are drives D: and E:

D: HLDT ST BD-RE GGW-H20L ATA
Loc 1 Ch 0 Target 1 LUN 0

EShared) PIONEER BD-RW BDR-206 ATA
Loc 0 CH 0 Target 0 Lun 0

The D: drive disappeared from Win 7 and would not respond to the front
panel button push. This went on for months.

When an optical drive stops responding to the front panel Eject button, the
first thing I look at is its power connection. The data connection isn't
used for that.

Before someone says you can indeed open the drive tray via software control,
what I'm saying is that software control doesn't physically push the front
panel Eject button.

Is there some place to look for some incompatibility in Win 7 or BIOS
or?

There shouldn't be any incompatibility, but speaking of the BIOS, if you
can't see the drive there, then Windows won't see it, either.

 

[Andy Burns]

When an optical drive stops responding to the front panel Eject button, the
first thing I look at is its power connection. The data connection isn't
used for that.

The OS can 'lock' the front panel button though, but I don't think I've
ever noticed Windows do it, only other OSes

 

[Gene E. Bloch]

Also an aside, within Win there is no way to track which drive is
which.

Have you looked at Disk Management?

In the graphical part of the display, clicking on the box that is
labeled

CD-ROM 0
DVD (D

(or whatever you might have) and choosing Properties will at least give
you the device ID. Mine says HL-DT-ST BD-RE BH10LS30, so you know that
drive D: is that unit. The other unit (it's in another computer, so I
won't look) has a different ID because its a different model. If it were
here, I'd be easily able to see that drive E: has that other model
number.

Actually, the same information is in System Information under
Components\CD-ROM, and it's easier to see there.

 

[Paul]

Win 7 Pro 64bit all up to date revs.

I have two BD drives.
Both worked OK.
One was an old drive and was missing a capability.

They are drives D: and E:

D: HLDT ST BD-RE GGW-H20L ATA
Loc 1 Ch 0 Target 1 LUN 0

EShared) PIONEER BD-RW BDR-206 ATA
Loc 0 CH 0 Target 0 Lun 0

The D: drive disappeared from Win 7 and would not respond to the front
panel button push. This went on for months.

The E: drive has always worked as expected.

This morning I was shocked to see that the D: was back in WE and
responds to the WE Eject click to open the door.

Weeks ago I went in and wiggled all the connections and I have booted
several times since then. I even tapped on the drive cases in case
something was loose.

Is there some place to look for some incompatibility in Win 7 or BIOS or?

Also an aside, within Win there is no way to track which drive is which.
If you click on properties in WE with a drive highlighted, the data
there does not indicate what "Hardware" tab description line refers to
the selected drive letter. I have to assume that the list of drives
"All disk drives" "Name Type" List are in order of drive letter. That
"Hardware" tab should list the drive letters. I cannot find useful info
in the "Hardware: tab "Properties" "Details".
I figured out what drive was what when I clicked on WE to eject and also
that I had one drive shared showing the shared icon. Sharing tab says
E: is shared.

You can try the Nero Infotool, to list your drives.
It includes the drive letter. Nero Infotool is free.
I haven't tested this version (for adware and the like).
There are also sites such as majorgeeks.com that may have
older versions.

ftp://ftp6.nero.com/tools/InfoTool.zip

This is what the interface looks like. Using
the disc tab, you can even insert optical media,
and the program will read the media tag on the media.
(Tell you it's made by Ritek etc.)

http://www.freeware.de/images/screenshots/40930/nero-infotool_large_1.jpg

*******

Optical drives, have a software feature to "lock" the front eject button.
On Linux and Unix OSes, when an optical disc is mounted (mount -t iso9660),
the lock state is changed so the user can't remove the disc while the OS
is using it. You have to unmount, before you can eject it.

I noticed the other day, that the "tray lock" function on my SATA optical
drive, will survive a reboot. The tray remained locked when the next
OS was booted. (That really shouldn't have happened.) The drive gave
the appearance of being effectively dead. That does not seem to happen
on IDE (because IDE has a reset# signal on the cable, and the drive
state is reset on a reboot). SATA has no guaranteed reset mechanism,
which is why the lock state can persist. My USB drive seems to unlock
properly on a reboot as well. The difference with the USB connection,
is the tray doesn't close on a reboot.

To guarantee recovery of SATA devices, requires a power off.
On IDE devices, a bus reset (during computer reboot) does the
job nicely. On USB, the device is generally well behaved - if
the USB device was completely hung (like a smart phone or
something), you'd power cycle the USB device to clean it up.
There is no reset signal as such, on the USB bus, but
the device states seem to work a little better than
whatever is supposed to happen on SATA. SATA has TX+/- and
RX+/- signals, and for some reason, they don't have a bus
based protocol to guarantee it is reset. When my SATA hard
drive hung, I had to cycle the power to detect it again.
If that was a IDE drive instead, a reboot would
have cleared it. SATA just doesn't seem to be designed right
with respect to reset-ability.

Paul