Solved Win 11 machine not seeing my dvd burner

I have an older LG (HL-DT-ST DB-RE) internal blue ray drive that has been in a win 7, win 10, and now a win 11 updated machine. Been a long while since I tried to use it but today I did. Slid in a DVD called "The natural" and it is just not recognized at all; blue light flashes for a long time and I can here the drive trying to read the disc to no avail . Tried standard DVD thinking that this drive would do both, as a test, and same thing. My standard LG drive works fine; pulled the cover of the pc and checked the plug ins but they look just fine. Tried updating the drivers and still the same. Drives are not expensive so I could just go out and pick another one up, but would like to try a few things first with your help!!!!!

Always hard to tell.

It could be a driver issue, a disk issue, or a drive issue, power issue etc.

The obvious things to try are different disk, putting drive in a usb caddy, check drivers etc.

But my experience is that drives always become temperamental if not used a lot. Maybe dust etc.

It could just be a dirty laser head, In the old days, you could get cleaning disks, but not seen them for years.

I recently had similar grief and bought a new usb dvd writer and harmony was restored.

Hi there
If it was working with W10 a possible solution is to mount a "restore image" of your W10 system (Macrium allows you to mount an image acessible via file explorer), then go to (in W11) device manager -- and under DVD drives / unknown device go to properties --> update driver and point to windows/system32/Driverstore folder on the W10 image -- tick the include subfolders box as well.

Cheers
jimbo

Does it read CDs? Drives use different lasers for CDs, DVDs, and BDs. It's possible for a laser to die, while the other laser(s) continue to work.

If you have a bootable DVD, try booting the PC from it. If you can boot from such a disk, then it's not a hardware issue.

If the hardware is OK, it may be the filters issue that has been around at least since NT4. Upperfilters Don't worry about the Vista reference.

I thought that it did read regular DVDs

Ok; I pulled out the unit and blew it out in the garage just in case. Installed it's original software disc ( 2010 ); put it back in place but used the wiring for the working unit. Wo9n't play anything including and CD's. So, I can pick up a new one locally for 85 to 100 dollars. So that is my plan noe. Thanks for input.

Just to be clear: you connected a known good drive to the PC (using the same cabling) and it ran? Meaning that the other drive appears to be dead?

correct; that's how it ended up; but that said, the blue light kept flashing and wouldn't stop.