DVD drive was acting up, so I got ready to take it out. I had it disconnected, but discovered that Media Player (PC) wouldn’t even play music stored on my hardrive without it. Now, I’m not in any itching hurry to buy a new one, I even read an article on the death of optical drives in the cloud era, but I do want to play media already stored. So just wondering if there’s a way to set that up, win 7 BTW.
Thanks
This is mainly just a bump, because I’m no expert, but have you tried uninstalling the DVD drive from the Control Panel? The problem may be that your computer is searching for the drive and not finding it. On the other hand, the problem may be related to the reason the drive was acting up in the first place.
I don’t know why it would affect your ability to play media already on your computer, though. I’ve had an optical drive or two go bad before and it hasn’t fazed WMP.
Yeah, I’m a little puzzled by this too. At the moment I’m typing on a Windows XP netbook that has never had an optical drive, (unless I connected the USB DVD writer at some point,) and it has no problem playing MP3s in media player.
As a random suggestion, which might help troubleshoot, do you have any other music playing software? iTunes or WinAmp? Can you try installing these to see if they have the same issue?
And just what are the symptoms? Does Media player look like it’s playing fine, but without any sound coming out? Does it stop as soon as you try to start a file, with no explanation of why? Or does it give you an error?
As for other music software, try VLC ( not my own preference, I use SMPlayer2 for video, and anything for music ); because it comes with nearly all it’s own codecs, it plays music as well as film, and it runs on practically everything.
I’d look into the sound settings of your operating system and see if DVD is somehow preferred as first choice for playback or something like that. It does seem a quite unique problom.
The OP is an outlier, after all!
But I concur with others. The only problem that remotely makes sense is that Windows doesn’t know that the DVD drive is gone. Media Player thus is looking for the DVD. Maybe there are some songs in the library that reference the DVD drive.
The thing is, Windows should automatically notice the drive is missing. It makes me wonder if the it’s not the drive but the controller that is messed up. The only workaround I can think of is to disable the non-existent drive in Device Manager, along with the controller if it’s not being used for any other drive. (It probably isn’t.) Then reboot.
Otherwise, using other software, like VLC, will be your only choice.
So a bit more info, but pretty much the same advice as everyone else.
EDIT: It’s a longshot, but check your computer for malware. And you may want to do a system file check.
In what manner is it disconnected? Did you simply remove the power cable, or is the data cable removed as well? Besides, a USB DVD drive doesn’t cost much.
i don’t use media player nor do i know what operating system or type of computer you have.
i media player you may need to have its source not be the DVD drive. open that program and change its setup.
if you disconnect a drive (disconnect the data cable) you need to tell the computer that it is no longer there. you may need to change the BIOS/CMOS settings before boot up.
I’m in the middle of a work cycle so I’ll be playing with these ideas later, but I had disconneted all the cables and was about to start on the screws when I noticed the problem. The dvd thing as a mechanical failure, so when I plugged it back in it worked fine. the media player would try to launch and then give a failure box, can’t rememberr what it said. Yes, I am an outlier, in so many ways.