Here's a good one. I just received a Mini Book PC, model TX-3. For the uninitiated, this is essentially a "PC" about the size of a large discman. It utilizes primarily notebook components, including the harddrive, ram and, in this case, a notebook DVD player, made by LG. The unit does not ship with an OS, so, upon receipt, I loaded a nice fresh install of Windows XP. I also loaded PowerDVD which ships with the unit. Here's the problem and it's a weird one: If the system is already booted into Windows XP it will not recognize any DVDs that are inserted. The DVD player will blink and try to read the disc, but ultimately, the DVD drive is reported as being empty by Windows (and, obviously, by PowerDVD). Now, here's the weird part, if I leave the DVD in the drive and reboot, the DVD is "recongized" under my computer, i.e., it displays the name of the inserted DVD. However, any attempt to play the DVD results in the system locking up for about five minutes while the DVD player attempts to read the disc. This occurs whether one uses Media Player or PowerDVD, although the later displays the following message after five minutes of reading: "Cyclic Redundancy Error" or something to that effect. The even weirder thing is, if I remove the DVD and then immediately reinsert it, it will not be recognized at all and I have to reboot again just to recognize it. Has anyone experienced a similar issue? I'm slowly becoming convinced it's a hardware issue with the DVD-Rom drive, but I don't have any laptops lying around with which to test the slimline drive. Oh, the player reads regular CDs just fine. The problems is only with DVDs. Any help would be appreciated.
I'm not too sure you will find the help you need in this forum since it is dedicated to video encoding, and the only input I have to add is be sure to check if DMA is enabled for the drive. You can do this by going to device manager, and then under IDE/ATAPI controllers, go to properties for the correct IDE channel, and check the transfer mode under advanced settings.. you may need to change this setting in the BIOS if you cannot change it here. Change it from PIO mode 4 (or whatever it is in the BIOS) to DMA or UDMA. Chances are you need to do this in the BIOS becuase XP usually picks up this info directly from the BIOS. Good Luck.. be sure to let us know how it works out!
