Help my combo DVD burner will read DVD's but not CD's

I just got a sony AW-Q170A-B2 combo dvd burner driver from Newegg and installed it in my new build. I have Windows Vista home basic running. The drive will read the installation DVD and my battlefield 2 installation dvd. When I put in an audio CD or a software title on CD the drive will not recognize it and vista tells me to put in an appropriate CD. I can't find any location for firmware to flash the sony drive. is this a Vista thing? Or do I need a specific driver or something? Device manager says the drive is installed and is working correctly.
Please help

Do you have a bootable CD you can test? An old XP disc will do, or Vista itself if it comes on a CD rather than a DVD (don't know which).

If you can boot your machine from a CD, that will tell you that it's a software problem rather than hardware.

it will not boot my windows xp install cd...it has not read any cd's...ugh i'm just tired of all this vista compatibility crap...

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Had it for 90 days. well scratch that idea.

All mine went the other way...CD worked and i blew the dvd part

Same problem with my 8x single layer liteon SOHW-something from 2003 dvd's yes, but CD's no.

did it's duty though so I went with a SATA DVD burner from liteon. works really nicely the last 5 burns.

Exact same problem here.

LG all-format DVD/CD burner bought about 4 months ago. DVD's are fine, but will not read/write any kind of CD including store-bought music CD and CD-RW's.

Mine's a Liteon LH-18A1H 487C. Got it for the dual layer and the lightscribe less than 2 weeks ago, worked fine for 1 week. Uses generic Microsoft CDROM driver but won't read CDs. Nero software tells me it reads CDs too, but won't recognize any CD I put in. DVD's fine so far. Strange. Not booting so I'm taking it back before the warranty expires.

same problem for me too, same drive - 3540a. one day it just decided not to work with CDs anymore. so i have that to burn dvds and another cd rw drive to do my CDs.

seems like a lot of cd drives do these after a bit of use. the ps2 seemed to have this problem too, if i recall. it would read ps2 dvds, but not ps1 cds after a while.

I have the SAME PROBLEM.

The problem ABSOLUTELY 100% is Vista. My XP CD and Vista DVD both boot at start up.

Get into the OS and suddenly any CD I put in is not detected by Vista at all!

I should have gotten a freakin' Mac!

I solved it.

If your winXP check your registry under: HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}]

if there is a string labeled either UpperFilters or LowerFilters. If either of these mention "PxHelp20.sys" remove it. You should see results almost instantly.
Another way to look for this is to go into device manager and look at the properties for the drive in question. In the driver tab see if that file is mentioned.

If you have vista it might be the same, but if not try running a search in your registry for this file.

can't find this in windows xp

This topic has been closed by Buwish