I'm messing around with this motherboard my dad had RMA'd to see if I can turn it into a usuable computer.
Works fine but the one thing that's got me perplexed is the DVD drives plugged into it.
The DVD writer seems to "read when it wants to", which is really weird. A lot of the time, it just won't read anything but sometimes it does read discs (I even burnt a disc using it). The drive is there in Windows Explorer and the BIOS also catches it but I can't get it to boot from the DVD drive (but it DID boot once so I managed to install Windows from it). In Windows I put discs in and it makes no attempt to read them...unless it suddenly WANTS to read them and then does.
Does this make any sense? A drive almost literally reading discs when it feels like it wants to read them.
It's cool. I figured out what was going on. The drive is an ASUS DRW-1608P2 drive and I'm fairly certain the motor has stopped working. Switching the drive to a new DVD-RW has resolved the issue.
The random reading is probably caused by the thing sputtering out it's last breaths. I'm pretty sure this thing is dead (or close to it). The discs won't spin up inside it, which means it's making no attempt to read them.
But it's bigger than that. Even at the BIOS level it won't attempt to read what's in the drive (meaning you can't boot from the drive) unless, again, it "feels like it".
If it can't read outside of the OS, it probably won't read in it either. There's something else up with the drive.
I'll keep it around but I'm not too faithful in it at the moment.
The best way to test it would be to hook it up to a completly different pc, which preferably has XP installed on it. If it doesnt work on that then im afraid its a paperweight