Aug 2

Written by: Stephen Frost
2/08/2010 10:52 AM 

My Dell Studio 1747 laptop (8GB RAM, 2 x 500GB HDDs, 17" screen) is a little ripper.  I use it to run VMware Server so that I can test build servers and play with software in a controlled environment.  But today I was trying to listen to an audio CD and the machine just wouldn't recognise it.  When I right-clicked on the E:\ drive in Explorer and selected Open, it ejected the CD and then complained that there was no CD in the drive.  Nuts!

After trawling Google for a while and getting absolutely nowhere, I tried the CD/DVD troubleshooting wizard on the Dell technical support website.  No good, although they recommended updating both the BIOS of the laptop and also the firmware of the CD/DVD drive (which was a TSSTcorp DVD+-R TS-T633C. 

So I dutifully downloaded new BIOS from Dell and flashed the laptop up to vA11 (it was previously on vA10).  No difference.

Then I downloaded the CD/DVD firmware from Dell and re-flashed the drive with version D800 A07 (which, incidentally, it was already running).  After rebooting ... SUCCESS ... now it recognises audio CDs and plays them.

I have no idea what happened to the CD/DVD drive, but obviously something somewhere somehow had upset the firmware in the drive, requiring it to be reloaded in order to work correctly.