Save my dvd-drive

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

So I finally twigged that if I’m to maintain some kind of cashflow, any upgrading of my PC will have to be done in a more sensible way than striding into the nearest high-street retailer and buying a £40,000 dvd-rom drive. It was with considerable trepidation that I ventured south of the river and purchased, for £55, a dvd drive and a copy of PowerCD. It came impressively unboxed, in a professional-looking poly bag, without the slightest hint of manual. So I’m not unimpressed with how far I got. I managed to crank out the plastic covering the spare drive slot on my Packard (spit spit spit) Bell computer, and slid in the new drive. It needed power (which I had to filch from my old CD-rom, with a too-short lead, which leaved the dvd drive sticking out like a sore thumb) and an IDE plughole (ditto)… but although it seems to function perfectly as a cd-player and cd-rom drive, it doesn’t recognise dvd discs at all. Just whirrs a bit and denies there’s a disc in there at all.

The drive is a Samsung SC-148P. The computer is a Packard Bell Pentium 3. The day is Tuesday. If I don’t manage to find a driver or something to make the drive work by Friday, I am going to drive out into the desert and shoot it gangland style, before dismembering and burying it. And I live in Scotland, so I’m going to have to drive an awfully long way before I hit desert.

This is your chance to save its life. I’ve already crawled around the Samsung and driver pages for hours, without hope. I realise many would gladly withhold information to see me kill the thing, but I’m prepared to kill my scanner instead.

This is not a driver forum. But I’d argue that ANYTHING posted by me is mundane and pointless, by definition. So… please? A little help?

2

That’s rather odd. Most dvd-drives don’t require drivers–all the work is done by the firmware.

I see two possibilities:

a) you’re the victim of false advertising. Double-check the serial number, equipment ID reported in your device manager, etc to see if you actually got a dvd-rom instead of a plain everyday, plebeian cd-rom, or

b) it’s broken. If it’s under warranty (and it should be), get on the horn with customer support and get them to fix it.

3

(enters sheepishly)

Ummm… yeah. Dr Slortar, you’re really pretty good at this, y’know… there’s someone over on the PowerDVD boards with the same problem, being bombarded with all kinds of technobabble.

The plain fact of the matter is, I was sold a CD-Rom drive. On your advisement I phoned the shop and gently suggested that something was amiss. The best I could get out of the bloke, who clearly knew he’d sold me the wrong thing, was that the fault was with the drive. On my returning said object, I got the guy who sold it to confess error. I have since installed a lovely shiny DVD drive and have today sat happily through Traffic, Last man Standing and Vertical Limit. All great except Traffic is taken (quite legitimately) from a Channel 4 series called Traffik, and I wish I’d seen the series so I could make withering comparisons.

Thank you. May the Lord make his face to shine upon you. May nothing mildly unpleasant happen to you, like an orange falling on your head. May you find an ice-cube maker when you really, really need one. I mean really.