What Does It Mean When DVD-RW Drives Only Read CDs?

So, I have a really strange hardware problem with a laptop optical drive where it can read any CD, but no DVD (I am sure this is not a region encoding issue, despite being a French-bought laptop).

The laptop in question is the Asus A6J. The laptop is using the most current BIOS version, and I updated the drive, the TSSTCorp L632D that originally shipped with the laptop with the most recent manufacturer firmware (when I was asked to troubleshoot, it was still the default I presume from Asus and was in the same state, that did not work of course).

It appears to have successfully flashed, so I am fairly certain that is not the issue.

No matter what I have tried, the drive will correctly read CD disks. Any DVD, regardless of region, content, etc. is never read.

In Windows or Linux or BSD, I do not see anything at all. Does anyone know how this could be possible? Does that mean there is a hardware disparity that the part able to read DVDs is broken and the CD reading components are functional?

The drive knows it is worthy of reading DVDs, according to Nero InfoTool. Thoughts?

Solution 1:

Optical drives use different lasers to read DVDs vs. CDs. It's entirely possible for one part to break and not the other. That's almost certainly what happened to you -- the drive is (partially) broken. Buy a replacement drive, or RMA if under warranty.