My DVD drive won't recognise that there is a DVD in it - it plays audio CD's and CD's with random files on fine, but when I try to play a DVD it says "please insert disk" etc. I've had the computer for 2 years, and it just started doing this today, when I have been playing DVD's up until yesterday, although it has been playing DVD's fairly jumpily for the past day or two. The DVD player is a Compaq DVD-ROM SD-612B, and has been working fine up til now as I said. I recently had a CD Rewriter and some more RAM installed but it had been fine after that even. Do I need to install different drivers (the DVD came with the PC so everything was installed already) or something?

hello time to clean the lens

Do I have to get a DVD lens cleaner - it's separate from the CD one no?

I have a Scotch Laser Lens Cleaner ,its a CD with these tiny brushes on it that clean the laser lens offf. It says on the Jewel case its for CD and DVD-ROM Drives.

OK, cleaned the lens... no joy! Was for CD/DVD-ROMS and worked fine, but my DVD disks are still not working - still not being recognised at all. Any other ideas?

I have the exact same problem. Mine suddenly stopped playing DVD's about a week ago either after I installed a codec pack or BSPlayer (a popular video player). Oddly it reads all audio/data CD's just fine. Since I got two new hard disks I had decided to play around with some things to see what changes might help solve the problem. Uninstalling all my codecs and video software didn't help and neither did uninstalling/reinstalling my DVD player. It turns out that XP machines have a lot of problems with DVD players and CD writers but after visiting the Microsoft website none of their solutions helped out either (such as making sure your DVD player isn't connected as a slave to your CD-Rom/writer). The only thing that helped in my case was completely reinstalling windows from scratch. (Repairing, updating and doing the automatic recovery all didn't help and different DVD players all acted exactly the same and work perfectly on other computers). After I had everything up and running I installed the K-lite codec pack again to see if this would cause the player to stop functioning again and yes, it did. When I reinstalled windows yet again I decided to take a different approach. I installed a few commercial codecs through their proper installation files (such as the ad-supported DivX file from divx.com) instead of using a pack and my DVD player miraculously remained functional but after installing PowerDVD it stopped working again! My conclusion: I have no earthly clue whatsoever to what the problem is. With all the testing I've done the only thing I've learned is that the it's a much more erratic problem than I thought it would be and nothing I've done can get it to work again but a fresh installation of windows (loosing all your settings and preferences on the way) and even then it stops fuctioning at the slightest video modification. If anyone can think up absolutely ANYTHING that could help I'm dying to hear it. sorry I couldn't help with a more permenent solution but I hope I was able to give some more specifics on what's going on although my english might not be that great :P My specs for the record: Pentium4 2.66 GHz P4T533 Motherboard with 512MB RD-RAM 2 x 120GB Hard disks in RAID 0 configuration Windows XP professional (English) Sony CD-(re)writer (Secondary Master IDE, no slave) Both DVD players were tested seperately on the Primary Master IDE (with no slave connections added) - Brandless DVD Player - Toshiba DVD Player Hercules 3D Prophet 9700 (ATi Radeon 9700) DirectX 9 300 Watt P4 Case.