DVDRW drive reads nothing (Disk is not formatted?)

[RaisingKane]

DVDRW drive (still) reads nothing, says it's a CD Drive

(problem was fixed by unplugging the drive and then plugging it back in after a minute)

I have a DVD-/+RW drive on my desktop, Windows XP. After installing a small audio converter/ripper from download.com and resetting, that drive no longer worked. Also, the program was not installed correctly (It did install correctly the 2nd time I tried. I'm pretty sure I screwed it up by blocking a certain registry change with Ad-Aware.

I get the same "Disk is not formatted" error for everything. I tried removing the drive and letting it redetect, and I tried System Restore, but neither worked. I tried going into Nero, but whatever I choose to do (Create Data Disk, System Info, etc...) nothing comes up. Please help.

 

[Spec]

That shouldnt have fixed it, but do you have 2 CD Drives one dvd-rw+- and a cd drive? if so, put the master cable into the DVD drive then run the secound port to the CD Drive, and run the piss outta the CD drive first, then go into your bios settings, and see if there enabled, set your DVD Drive as Master, and the CD drive as a slave.

 

[Gamingfreak]

try reinstalling the driver for it

 

[RaisingKane]

I was just going to google to try to find the driver (and ask if I was having trouble)... when I noticed that My Computer was recognised the drive as a DVDRW again (as opposed to CD-ROM or some thing with a question mark). I really do not understand why it suddenly started working (I restarted my computer several times yesterday, including two System Restores (3 if you count reverting a restore).... But it somehow fixed itself, or I did something right at the last shutdown. Sorry for the "false" alarm... ^^;;

Maybe it was because I turned off Ad-Watch completely...

 

[RaisingKane]

I take it back. It seemed to be able to read things okay, and I erased a CDRW disc, but it couldn't burn the disc, and when I tried the 2nd time, my computer crashed. When I tried to log in, my computer froze again, and I had to log out and back in without the disk in in order to get back on. Now it won't read things again, doesn't see itself as a DVDRW... I'll see if I can find the driver somewhere...

The way my drives are set up, I have one cable that goes to a DVD drive and then splits from there to the DVD burner. I believe it was on "cable select" last time I replaced the drive...

The drive is called "TSSTcorp CD/DVDW'TS-H5u2B". Where can I find new drivers for it, or reinstall drivers?

The drive worked perfectly fine until recently...

I also tried uninstalling the drive under Device Manager and then scanning for new hardware changes, but nothing changed (the drive came back up, but still doesn't work and still thinks it's a CD drive).

The only thing I could find was a firmware update on the Gateway site, but that was "TS-H552B"... It's so close, but not quite what I have. Should I try flashing the drive anyway?

I tried deleting the Upper/LowerFilters registry values and restarting... I found the UpperFilter, but there was no LowerFilter, only a "LowerFilter.bak". I exported the values before I changed. Deleting and restarting changed nothing, so I restored the values, and now I have UpperFilter.bak and LowerFilter.bak, and no non-"bak" ones. Then I tried removing the ".bak" parts from the two values and restarting. The drive once again was recognized, just like in the previous post, but when I tried to burn... The whole thing went down again, and it's back to CD Drive. Also, since this whole problem started, my computer has been starting up rather slow...

It was suggested that I physically unplug and replug the drive. I did that, and the drive was recognized as DVDRW (the first time it didn't show up at all, but that was because I had left a CD in the drive when I restarted--taking it out and restarting fixed that) and successfully burned a CDRW, so it looks like it's all back to normal.