It sounds like a hardware problem with the drive itself, which should still be under warranty (unless you bought a refurbished or discontinued/clearance system, which could have a shorter warranty). Normally I'd test a suspect optical drive in another system (if possible), but since the drive still reads CDs it probably isn't a problem with a cable or MB. If you still have your old system and are comfortable swapping an optical drive around, that would be the best way to prove or disprove a hardware problem with the drive itself.

Failing that, to confirm it is not a software problem, you could try booting to a live Linux distribution (or even a Win 98/ME floppy), and see if you have the same problem reading DVDs. If you know anyone who bought Vista, you could borrow the DVD to see if you can boot from it in the DVD and DVD-RW drives (and cancel if and when it brings up the installation menu options).

CD-based Linux Distributions and Live Linux CDs (I've heard Puppy Linux mentioned favorably, but have not tried it)

Boot Disks


The MS hotfix only applies to DVD-RW disks formatted in a certain way, not DVD+R/-R or commercial DVDs.


Even without trying the drive in another system or under Linux/DOS, you should contact the place you bought the computer about this problem. Small computer stores could probably check the drive fairly quickly; larger stores may have longer turn-around times, but might try to get to stuff that looks like in-warranty hardware problems sooner, to minimize the wait for replacement parts.