Pale Musings

Getting Vista to recognize my CD/DVD Burner

My laptop is a Dell Inspiron 1720 running Windows Vista Home Premium. About a month ago I started having issues with InfraRecorder running on the laptop failing to recognize my TSSTCorp DVD+RW TS-632D ATA drive made by Samsung. The burning software would not show any burners installed until I rebooted after which it would work fine.

Last weekend even rebooting stopped working. Nothing I could do would fix the issue. Reinstalling the Roxio software that came with the Dell worked fine, but InfraRecorder would not. I started troubleshooting the issue and eventually opened a service ticket with Dell Support. The first support ticket suggested that I uninstall all burning software, shut down the computer and re-seat the drive. I did all of that, then reinstalled. The problem was still there, no burner detected in InfraRecorder.

After a frustrating weekend trying to figure it out, I contacted Dell a second time. After over 2 hours of a support technician controlling my PC, uninstalling and reinstalling rivers, software, updating, etc.. the problem was still there. The only advice she could give me was to contact the vendor. Not a very satisfactory answer.

I spent a few more hours perusing forums that were less and less like my situation and environment. I finally ran across a post with similar symptoms but a different environment. The fix for the user in the post was not an option for me, there are no updated drivers; however, a response below that suggested the following:

SOLUTION:
I looked around and found an article that mentioned a particular bios setting change so I gave it a go and it fixed it.

The setting is on the screen. The setting is and I set it to ‘RAID/IDE’. (Sets the SATA channel to RAID mode and IDE channel to IDE mode), when it booted, it detected some new devices, installed them automatically and away she went.

This was not a setting I changed, the default mode is IDE which is what I had and seems more logical to me.

Based on this I started looking in my BIOS settings. I found my SATA controller was set to the default value of AHCI. Optionally I could change it to ATA. Since my drives description read TSSTCorp DVD+RW TS-632D ATA I decided to try the ATA setting. Doing so required me to first disable the Flash Cache feature, which if I understand it correctly I have never used. I also had to answer “yes” to an ugly, scary message that my machine might not boot and I may have to reinstall the OS after making the change.

Fortunately, I did not have to reinstall. Windows did recognize a new controller and required another reboot, but after that, my problem was solved!

I do not know if anyone else will get any use from this or not, but considering the time spent on figuring this out (roughly 8 hours) I thought it would at least be prudent to write it down.

January 23, 2008 - Posted by palehorse | Gadgets, Operating Systems, Windows