Windows 7 Drive Problem

[peacefulguy]

Hi Guys, I have just installed Windows 7 64bit Ultimate into my Lenovo 3000 N200 laptop. The instal went ok and everything is working fine except windows did not detect my dvd burner on the system. Its in the bios but windows 7 did not detect it. I have googled and tried various methods, but nothing works. Even went to Lenovo and updated drivers, still no joy. I installed from the drive with a clean install after fdisking. Its got me stumped, maybe have to go back to xp. I have Windows 7 on my other computer and it does not have this problem, so its not the disk.
Any info would be good thanks.

Cheers

[Synbios]

There's a few things you can try.

Go to device manager and see if it shows up there (with a yellow question mark, or anything).

If the drive shows up in device manager and doesn't have any driver problems, the drive may need a driver letter. Go to Administrative Tools, Computer Management, then on the left click Disk Management. The drive may show up there, and you can assign a drive letter to it.

[peacefulguy]

I checked that but it doesnt show up in device manager, even ran the microsoft cd/dvd problems and it said no device is preasant. Its there and opens and closes but doesnt show up anywhere, so frustrating 

[Synbios]

If it's an older machine running 32bit, I would recommend just putting XP back on it if the disk drive is something you use frequently.

I usually don't recommend upgrading 32bit machines with XP to go to windows  7. Other than interface changes, there are little advantages to running it and it takes a bigger performance hit on your machine. Sure, 7 is optimized and faster than Vista, but XP is still widely supported and is definitely faster than 7 in 32bit environments.

IMO, the best 32bit OS in the Windows family is XP Pro. If you have a 64bit machine running Vista, then that's a worthy upgrade to 7. Ideally nobody should be running Vista. All the drivers from Vista work on 7, so you shouldn't lose any devices.

Older laptops however, may not have drivers for Vista/7, especially if they came with XP.

I do not recommend XP Pro 64bit, since driver availability is even more scarce as most people assume that if you have a 64bit machine, you're running 7 these days.

[peacefulguy]

Its not an old machine, less than 2 years old and dual core processors, also came with Vista preinstalled. It seems to be a common problem not just with laptops, but still no resolution to this problem. These are the specs.
Lenovo 3000 N200 0687-A31: Intel (R) Pentium (R) Dual CPU T2310(1.46GHz), 1GB RAM, 120GB 5400rpm HD, 14.1in 1280x800, Intel X3100, CDRW/DVDRW, Intel 802.11agn, Bluetooth, Modem, 10/100 Ethernet, Windows 7 Ultimate!
I dont really want to go back to xp or vista, or I have just wasted the money buying windows 7.

Thanks :-)

[Synbios]

Even though its dual core, it's still a pentium which is pretty old these days.

Regardless if it had vista pre-installed, the drivers from the Lenovo website should have worked fine as Vista and 7 drivers are 100% compatible. Have you tried a Windows Update? Sometimes that detects and updates some of the hardware.

I have never had any problems with 7 not detecting hardware on computers designed for Vista.

[peacefulguy]

It is quite a common problem, you only have to google it and a thousand pages come up, all with the same thing. There are apparent fixes out there but they dont work in all cases, mines being one of them.
But thanks for your help anyway :-)

[chip!]

howdy..  peaceful,   what brand/model of DVD drive is it?   also, in your BIOS, are you configuring your storage drives as SATA, IDE, or AHCI ?   and.. in your Device Manager, do you have *any* yellow question mark devices?

also, can you export these registry paths and attach them here so i can look at them?

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}


HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\cdrom


HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\IDE

[HelloKitty]

um it can be that windows seven don't support that cd/dvd drive i know i have a hp pavilion dv9027us and if i put windows 7 on it i can't use my hdmi port so i went back to vista


have you try an external cd/dvd driver? or switch out the cd/dvd driver

[peacefulguy]

Hi Chip I hope I have done this right.

[chip!]

hi peaceful, thanks..

question, does the drive show up in Safe Mode? (Press F8 when booting the computer, and Start in Safe Mode)

also, lets try one other thing to get some info:

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/devmanview.zip (or, if you have a 64bit OS: http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/devmanview-x64.zip )

1. run it, and then sort by "Device Type Code"
2. you should see "DVD/CD-ROM drives" near the top
3. highlight all of the entries that are the "DVD/CD-Rom Drive" (use SHIFT if you have to select more than 1)
4. go to File, and then Save Selected.. and then attach the saved .txt here..

this is interesting

[peacefulguy]

Hi Chip thanks for the reply, unfortunately I had to reformat back to xp, as I needed it for work and for it to be working. I will retry it again later on when I have time to reformat again. I have kept your info and when I do it again I will let you know and send you the info.

Thank you

Peacefulguy

[chelseaman]

Hi peacefulguy,  Similar thing happened to me yesterday. Was trying to update daughters Toshiba laptop and sites kept coming back to tell me that software necessary was not available to update. Went through device manager with same results. It wouldnt install driver for dvd drive. I had two ways to go. use original cd rom which I cant find at moment,or as I found out Toshiba kept all the drivers and software in their file on hard drive.(from original cd install)  I burned all the drivers etc to cd, went back into device manager, right clicked on dvd drive,install update.When asked i put cd in and pc took it from there and updated  to latest driver. I breathed a sigh of relief.
Looking at your stats 1.46GHz processor seems  quite low for 2 year old.? 1GB Ram? can this be increased. I had to add 2nd 1GB stick
Used same cd wiith device manager to update modem/chip/graphics/audio etcYours might be a different problem, but most laptop manufacturers like you to stay with their software and updates.
will await your next
cheers

[peacefulguy]

Yep its a common problem apparently, when you google it a thousand pages come up lol. I had to reformat and put xp back in for now as I needed it for work. I have since put in another gig of memory as it only has 1 slot which is quite uncommon for a laptop. I will try it again soon with 7 and see if the problem can be resolved. Even Lenovo forum could not come up with a solution lol. Thanks for the info anyway and I will try again soon :-)

Cheers

[Synbios]

I just had the same problem when installing 32bit 7 on a Lenovo SL500. It didn't have any problem on the 64bit version.

I tried to install XP and it crashes when the CD ROM is set to AHCI, I'm pretty sure that might be part of your problem. I set the CD-ROM to Compatibility.

Form wiki:

"Many SATA controllers offer selectable modes of operation: legacy Parallel ATA emulation, standard AHCI mode, or vendor-specific RAID. Intel recommends choosing RAID mode on their motherboards (which also enables AHCI) rather than the plain AHCI/SATA mode for maximum flexibility, due to the issues caused when the mode is switched once an operating system has already been installed.[2] Legacy mode is a software backward-compatibility mechanism intended to allow the SATA controller to run in legacy operating systems which are not SATA-aware or where a driver does not exist to make the operating systems SATA-aware.

AHCI is fully supported out of the box for Windows Vista and Linux operating systems from kernel 2.6.19, as well as later operating systems such as Windows 7. Older operating systems require hardware-specific drivers to support AHCI."

On my computer I noticed that once the OS is installed, there is NO way to change the mode of the hard drive controller so you are stuck with what you select originally. Also this explains why the XP install crashes.

I think the problem is that newer machines designed to have 64 bit may potentially have problems with AHCI drives because there are simply not drivers available for it. I checked your post but if you were trying to run 32 or 64bit OS.

If you ever take a crack at the install again, you should set your SATA controller to compatible/parallel ATA mode and see how that goes.