I'm having this problem with my computer now. I have a dell inspiron 6000 with the sony dvd-rw drive that came with it. I have never had problems with playing dvds in the past. I have had problems in the past year with burning new ones, but now my computer won't even recognize that there is a dvd in the drive. I tried older dvds and they still work. the newer ones work fine on a stand alone dvd player. Anyone know if I can fix this problem or will i need a new dvd player

3/6/2007 8:45:03 PM

i just got a new dell and for some reason i had been able to play older dvds, but i put a newer one in and the only way i could play it was to switch the drive region to 1 rather than unspecified (or whatever it is before you change it) now they all work.

3/6/2007 10:20:58 PM

Do you have any sort of warranty on the machine where you can get the drive replaced? Have you tried the same drive in a different machine with the same DVDs?

I've seen cases with some Dell systems (namely the Optiplex 620 and Himachi drives) where the drives will ship with bad firmware and fail Dell's own diagnostic tests.

3/7/2007 6:05:09 AM

I looked around on the internet and found that the problem could be because of a company called ProtectDisc. Evidently new dvds will be made so that windows based programs will not be able to read the disc, making your computer dvd player obsolete. Is this true. If so, can i get around it. I saw something about a program called AnyDVD but it didnt work for me.

3/7/2007 2:02:13 PM