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Optical Drive sometimes not recognized on boot
I've had a bit of a problem that has persisted through a lot of hardware and software changes on a Latitude E6510 Laptop.
An Optical Drive (MATSHITA DVD+-RW UJ892 ATA Device, Firmware v 1.04) shows up in the BIOS/Windows about half the time on system restart. That is to say, sometimes when I boot it, it shows up, sometimes it doesn't. The problem has persisted through a new optical drive, a new motherboard, a BIOS update, a Optical Drive Firmware update and a variety of other things.
I can force it to be recognized if I take it out, put it back in and scan for hardware changes in the device manager, but that is hardly a solution.
Is this a known issue and is there some magical solution to it because I'm out of ideas.
osprey4
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November 17th, 2010 10:00
Hi Mkautzm,
Have you opened the machine to check the connector to the drive? Is the connector part of the motherboard. I'm just baffled that you've got a new drive and motherboard and are still having this problem.
mkautzm
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November 17th, 2010 10:00
Yeah, I've completely disassembled and reassembled that computer some 5 times and am rather certain the connections are solid. I'm convinced at this point it's something software related. It's such a bizarre problem and I have no idea where to go with it. What I'm going to do is put a different optical drive in it from a different model just to see what happens. We have a few D610 drives and I'm probably going to throw one of those in there just to see what happens.
mkautzm
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November 18th, 2010 14:00
Upon my attempts to test the issue, I learned that the E-series laptops use a SATA connection while the D-Series laptops do not and I can't find anything else that would work with an E-series machine other than other E-series drives which defeats the purpose of my testing leading me back to square one.
mkautzm
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November 29th, 2010 10:00
I'm going to give this a bump, hoping that someone has the magic answer to this problem!
osprey4
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November 30th, 2010 15:00
The only thing I can suggest is keep going back to Dell. At some point, if the problem cannot be fixed, they should replace the entire laptop.
ven42
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January 4th, 2011 14:00
Did you ever find a solution to this problem?
I work in IT in an enterprise environment, and we deploy many E6510 laptops to our staff. We just ordered about a dozen more of these computers recently, and about six of them suffer from this same problem right out of the box, brand new!
Same exact symptoms as described by the OP, but I will also add that the affected laptops do not all share the exact same optical drive brand. Some are Matshita, some are PLDS (I think that's the name... I don't have one in front of me right this moment), and I think there may have been at least one TSST in there. I can get more exact information if anyone thinks it might be helpful. The main point, though, is that this problem seems to be independent of a particular brand or model of optical drive, based on my own experience with this batch of E6510's.
Has any more information surfaced yet about this problem?
mkautzm
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January 5th, 2011 08:00
We ended up actually sending in the laptop to Dell and it appears to be working, although we haven't really tested it heavily. We spent weeks exhausting our resources until we just threw in the towel as we just don't have the time to poke around with problems that never seem to go away. Unfortunately, to this day, I have no idea what actually causes this but if you ever do find something on it, I'd love to hear about it!
ven42
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February 9th, 2011 10:00
Well, I think I finally have a solution to this problem... over a month later!
Dell Support unfortunately had no solutions to offer, but talking with them did at least get the gears turning in my own head a bit more. Eventually, I tried mucking around with the SATA/RAID controller instead of the optical drive or the BIOS, and that seemed to have fixed the problem. It seems as if there was a rather old version of the driver installed in Windows. I updated it with the latest one available, and now the optical drive magically shows up every time without fail. I've tested this so far on about three E6510's that were exhibiting the problem, and so far so good on all of them. Your mileage may vary, of course, but this is definitely the solution for me.
Original problematic SATA/RAID controller driver version: 8.6.2.1012 (from 4/8/2009)
Latest working SATA/RAID controller driver version: 10.1.0.1008 (from 11/6/2010)
Dell's website did not have the latest version available for download, so I got it straight from Intel's website. Here's the link:
http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?DwnldID=19607
Two downloads should be listed. One is English-only, and the other is multi-language.
I hope that helps somebody else out there!
osprey4
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February 9th, 2011 12:00
Hi Ven42,
Excellent job, and thanks for posting the solution!