XPS m1530 TEAC DVD +/- RW Not Working

Hey Folks,

I ordered a certified refurbished XPS m1530 through the Dell Outlet on June 26, 2008. After receiving it on June 30, 2008, I immediately put the little beast through the paces. Well, everything but the TEAC DVD +/- RW worked.

I could pop a cd or dvd in the drive and hear it spin, but windows would not recognize any disc i inserted. In fact, going to Start->Computer in Vista, the drive was listed as a plain CD Drive. I know from experience that it should be DVD RW, or something along those lines.

I decided to pop the Vista OS DVD in and reboot the computer. Upon reboot, I held down F12 to access the boot menu. I selected CD/DVD from the boot menu, but the computer still would not recognize the disc in the drive. The computer eventually booted into Vista from the HD.

I proceeded to call the XPS tech support. Support had me go through a few test with different discs. I also reinstalled everything from the recovery partition as instructed. Unfortunately, there was no solution other than to overnight a new dvd drive and have it installed by a local tech.

The tech arrived and installed the replacement part on July 2, 2008 around noon. After installation, I proceeded to test the drive. I immediately noticed, through Start->Computer, the DVD RW drive was listed correctly. I should also note that the drive was listed twice, but the tech and I chalked it up as a Vista quirk. Before the tech left, I inserted the Vista OS dvd and proceeded to reboot the computer. Using F12 to access the boot menu, I was finally able to boot from DVD.

Later, on the evening of July 2, 2008, I was back at square one. The replacement dvd drive was behaving exactly as the original. The drive was mislabled as CD Drive in Vista, and I could not boot to the OS dvd.

I called XPS support back and ran through the same tests as the first time. The let the support guy connect to my laptop where he deleted the upper and lower filters in the registry (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314060). He also removed the drive and rebooted the pc. None of these steps worked, so I am being sent another DVD drive, and I expect it here July 7, 2008.

I asked the tech to also replace the motherboard, but he said all signs point towards two bad dvd drives. I'm convinced there its strictly a hardware problem, and i'm not sure its isolated to the dvd drive. We shall see how the third performs.

I apologize for the long winded narrative, but I thought I could get the opinion of the community on this issue. I'll keep posting until this is resolved, so someone else may use this as reference in the future.

Thanks.