pioneer DVD-RW 105

[sweenster]

I'm having problems with this DVD writer i've just bought (for £15!).. it was sold as seen so maybe this explains my problem.

The device is detected fine by winXP, and plays CD's no problem. it doesnt play any DVD's however. I tried putting a few off-the-shelf Region 2 disks in and seeing what happened, but nothing did.

So then I figured it could be the region settings. I changed the settings in device manager but still no luck.
That left Firmware - which I tried to upgrade to a region-free version but it wouldn't let me. It just responded with:

<-[0m <-[41m --> Failed --> error: sense key = 5<-[0m <-[0m

For firmware upgrade I started system with an old Win98 startup disk, drive was connected as master on 2nd IDE port (not sharing with any other drives). Primary IDE still had my 2 HDD's on it.

Any ideas / suggestions?

[Basscyst]

Are these just regular video DVD's? If so do you have DVD decoding software installed? Such as PowerDVD. Does it read data dvd's?

Basscyst

[sweenster]

its just an ordinary movie (region 2 disk) bought out of a shop and they worked fine on powerDVD in my old DVD-ROM drive.

It just doesnt read the data, the disk just spins and the light stays on

[sweenster]

<update>
I think I may have figured the problem. Nero is detecting the drive as a CD-RW rather than a DVD-RW. I also managed to flash it with the latest RPC-2 firmware. Could this be to do with the windows device driver or could this be hardware related? I'm running with an an Athlon 1600XP and VIA chipset. It does the same in Win98 and XP
</update>