I'm having a really tough time getting my DVD drive to read burned CD audio discs and some older retail audio CDs. It recognizes the 44kb .cda files but will not play the discs with winamp, itunes or WMP. They all play perfectly in all of my various home cd players. However I can't get them to upload to itunes to put on my ipod. My mother found an old CD case of mine when she doing some packing for a move and I reaquired some long lost albums from my collection: The Bends, Low End Theory and James Brown Live at the Apollo amongst them. I also just got about 8 CDs that came with my mouse of the day pledge to WFMU. These are DJ premiums and they are cheaply mass produced CD-Rs with lots of great music on them. Perfect for adding to my ipod. Can't do it though due to the problem above. I've checked for updated drivers and non exist. I am running Windows XP Home. I've googled the problem and run through the MS forums. Lots of people describe the problem but I have been unable to find a solution. This is my go to spot for tech support and I've been helped many times before. Maybe one of you has an idea..... Thanks.
What kind of drive do you have? Most decent rigs will have two drives, one DVD burner and one read-only DVD because the latter tends to be a lot more reliable and faster for reading purposes. It's really easy to install but it seems to be harder to find in stores except for very large computer stores like Fry's.
I currently have a DVD-ROM drive and a CD-RW drive. The problem seems to be with both drives. I am not sure of the brands. The DVD-rom is a replacement for one that died but did not have this problem until recently. The CD-RW drive is original to the computer which is a Dell.
Interestingly, some drives have problems reading certain brands of discs. If you can go do the device manager on your computer and suss out the make and model of the drives, you can go to videohelp.com and look up the drive... and if you are lucky, people will have mentioned what brands of media they have and haven't used successfully with that drive. If you're fantastically lucky, all the information to diagnose your problem will be on that site. You might have to clone those discs on a different computer.
I would say, you need a new drive, but if two drives are doing the same thing, good chance it's the CD, and not the drive...