I have a Sony DRU820A DVD-RW, and within the past day it just stopped readin any discs whatsoever. It does not recognize that I have put a disc into the drive.

However, when i reboot my computer, if i leave a cd in the drive, it wont start windows until i take the disc out...so i know the drive works properly.

What could the problem be?

may be it's worth to clean up the drive with the hlp of special cleaning disks.

i already tried that, but the cleaning discs dont work seeing as they wont run in the drive because they are not recognized as being present within the drive.

How long was it working before it quit? Was there anything going on when it quit? Can you offer any other details, right now what you have is pretty limited.

i too have this problem but my drive is an emprex 8x dvd-rw drive (the drive works perfectly in XP Sp2) but not in vista 32bit rc2. it will burn new disks but it wont read them. the disks are readable in xp. the problem is microsoft's ide controller system... it needs serious looking at... maybe they could re-use xp code instead of the new code which clearly doesnt work properly.

I still think this to be an issue with the DVD drive itself. See iif you can get it replaced, esp if its under warranty.

you both had the same problem as me... buy a new one