Latitude E-Series DVD Burner troubles

I'd keep the Panasonic drive over the TSST; the missus' E6400 had the TSST drive in it, and it seemed more temperamental than the Panasonic drive in my M4400 - noisier, more finicky about media & slower to recognise discs; so I had them send a Panasonic drive to replace it.

 

I am new to this site but this is one of the few i have found that talks about the e6500 DVD problems. We are having a little different problem than what i have read on here. Our company purchased 40 of the e6500 with XP as the factory install. We installed our own volume license version of XP and now the DVD drive randomly disappears. It is a Mata/Panasonic UJ862A drive.

There are not warnings or anything. You can be watching a movie on it and suddenly it disappears, doesn't show up in my computer, device manager anywhere. Once you take it out of the computer and re-seed it, it shows back up and works. You don't even have to be using it when it disappears. I have one on next to me and check it every so often and it will sometimes be there and sometimes not.

We have updated the firmware, drivers are up-to-date and nothing works. Dell replaced the system board and dvd drive from one machine and it still does the same thing. It is all of our machines too. We are completely stumped with this. Dell is no help at all. They just keep telling us to update the firmware even though we do!

Anyone have any ideas?

 

your optical drive is on SATA. Windows XP does not support SATA.
I had the same thing on my desktop (among other HDD related issues). The fix was simple.
Get a good old floppy drive, plug it onto a functional system, get a floppy and put the SATA drivers in 1 or 2 disks. Now go your laptop and attach that USB floppy drive, and you'll need to install the SATA drivers BEFORE Windows XP setup. You will have a split second to press F6 when the setup loads to load your drivers. Once done tell Windows XP to load and install the drivers. This may take a min or two. Once done, continue Windows XP installation.

You'll need to do that on every computer. See, Easy!
Dell provided XP is a special Microsoft release with a SATA drivers included for all system. So you have to use that, or the method above on every machines.

Alternatively, Vista supports properly SATA natively. Don't worry, Vista does not kill people nor cats, it's quiet a good OS, as long as you don't use a mentally ill 8 year old kid, specialized software made for XP ONLY! and Even refuses to run under Vista compatibility mode. If it's for peripherals, check your printer manufacture for the needed Vista drivers or call the company for alternative drivers. In my case my HP printer is the laserjet 1012, but i used 1015 drivers for Vista 64-bit and it worked. If you use Vista 32-bit it should support XP drivers.

 

You did not set anything in power options to disable optical drive, right?

I had the same symptom on a Vista Ultimate installation, that the optical drive disappears. It turns out that the problem was caused by an ISO mounting software program, Virtual Clone Drive, somehow conflicting with Nero. I uninstalled VCD and reinstalled it, and then it is fine.

There used be a problem with the optical drive disappearing in XP, and you can fix it with registry changes. Do a google search and you should find it. It has to do with the Upper and Lower Filters keys. If you have a CD/DVD burner program installed, perhaps you can uninstall that and see if the problem goes away.

I am not convinced that it is a SATA issue. Your hard drive is a SATA drive, and XP has no problem using it. You can set SATA native mode in BIOS to disabled so that the SATA device can appear as an ATA device. Or your XP install disc may already have the SATA drivers slip-streamed in.

 

there is a new firmware for the TSST TS-U633A.
According to dell:
1. Improve write quality of Sony DVD+/-RW media.
2. Improve the compatibility to various versions of DellDiag Confidence Test.
download link: http://support.euro.dell.com/suppor...eid=R213765&formatcnt=1&libid=0&fileid=306475

 

I'm having the same as adeyo. Bought 22 E6500 Latitudes that all have the XP SP3 factory Vista downgrade pre-installed and the Matsua UJ862A drives.

Have set up about 16 of these so far and had the drive disappear from My Computer or I will be copying from a CD and it will fail half-way through..not being able to find the contents to copy because it is no longer seeing the drive. Ditto when installing Office 2007.

Called Dell support today and the guy said he had never encountered this problem before [deja vu on hearing this sort of thing from them] and meanwhile people have been reporting problems with this online a few months before I'd even ordered these.

I wish they would be honest about known problems, find a solution for them and then go into lists to let people know what the fix is.

I too was told to upgrade the firmware although what it is showing is on there is the same 1.02 as is available online.

 

Make sure you are using the latest (8.8) version of the Intel Matrix Storage driver (and software?). The burners are SATA and the Matrix Storage controls what happens.

A lot of the early reported problems with the burners were caused by the matrix storage software.

John