“My DVD drive is not operating properly. It can play music CDs but when it plays DVDs the video and the sound are distorted.” It was my customer’s complaint about his Toshiba Satellite L25-S1215 laptop.
The following laptop troubleshooting steps helped me to fix the problem. The laptop booted to Windows pretty fast without any errors, with a normal hard drive sound and spinning CPU fan. I restarted the laptop couple times and didn’t notice anything abnormal. I tested the optical drive with a generic data CD and a DVD movie. The drive recognized the data CD and all files on it but refused to play the DVD correctly. The video and sound output from the DVD movie was choppy, skipping scenes. It looked like a defective DVD drive and I ordered a replacement from Toshiba under warranty. I was pretty sure that a new DVD drive will fix the problem, but it didn’t. After I replaced the DVD drive the same problem occurred right away. The laptop had 256MB memory installed and 64MB were reserved for the video memory. I blamed a lack of memory and installed an extra 512MB memory stick and it didn’t help either. My guess about a corrupted video driver was wrong too because after I downloaded and reinstalled the driver the DVD video still was distorted. In cased like this, when we are not sure what is causing the problem the software or the hardware, we always install a test hard drive and reload the original factory software. I installed a test HDD and reloaded Toshiba Satellite L25 restore CD. After that the problem with a distorted video and audio output was fixed and I was able to play the movie for 2 hours without errors. Most likely, the problem with playing DVD occurred because of corrupted software.
If you have a similar problem with your laptop, do not rush to replace the DVD drive. Backup the important data and run a restore CD, it might fix your problem.
Related posts:
Toshiba Satellite M45 laptop freezes up after playing a DVD movie for about 30 minutes to an hour
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February 12th, 2011 at 9:44 pm
Have a Toshiba Satellite M105 and my DVD drive would not read or play any type of cd or dvd. I have read other sites suggesting that I had to purchase a new DVD drive but today was different. Ran across your site and took your suggestion that told me to backup my hard drive on my laptop, find my restore driver CD (did not know I had) and did everything as instructed. After the backup and the drivers reinstallation (for my movie and dvd drivers), within in minutes, I heard my first CD and saw my first movie on my laptop that I had not seen since October of 2010. I was just about to buy a new DVD drive and put it in when the problem was just the drivers. Probably was deleted by a new program or a delete of a program, either case, this was a good day! Thank you for this site. Will recommend you to all of my computer friends.
August 4th, 2010 at 6:51 pm
I have toshiba satellite laptop when i plug the power to a laptop together with the battery my laptop is hang up when i push the power button, but if my laptop was off then i plug the power the charging is ok then i remove the power then i on the power button den it’s ok, what is the common problem with my laptop?
June 27th, 2009 at 11:30 pm
logicbrain,
At this point I cannot tell if you problem is software or hardware related.
Have you checked all sound settings? I belied if you reinstall the driver, it might keep the old settings
Have you tried using Windows system restore utility? Try restoring Windows back to the time when it had good sound.
June 24th, 2009 at 1:01 am
hi,
i have SATELLITE L10-194 note book.
i was playing flash games, suddenly sound distoted,
at that time i tink that it may be game problem, but
when i closed the game and played a movie, it was shoking,
the sound i am hearing is only surroundings sound and
main charactor sound is muted, (like karaoke), i also hear the music, amazing… my brain is getting blown, how is it possible?….
steps taken>>> sound drivers reinstalled—- result same
tried morethan two headphones- result same
finally recovered(withoriginal dvd) —- same
hint—– some videos & clips having 16bit or 64bit
audio are playing good sound…
Request— please help me… Thanks in advance.
March 10th, 2009 at 5:39 pm
Thank you sooo much! My DVD/CD drive has had distorted sound for quite a while now and I have not found a solution until now.
February 22nd, 2009 at 12:59 pm
Thank you, Rob!! I’ve had my laptop for 2 yrs with no problems until this last week. I thought for sure I needed a new DVD drive. I was searching for possible solutions and came upon this site. Your fix took 1 minute and worked perfectly. Thank you soooooo much!!
February 10th, 2009 at 7:09 pm
It really works – was about to buy new DVD drive
and found this site
Tried your suggestion and problem solved
THANKS SO MUCH
November 5th, 2008 at 6:28 pm
I’ve had my Toshiba Satellite for a year without being able to play DVDs. Thanks so much for such a quick, easy and cheap fix!
September 21st, 2008 at 8:23 pm
Thank all you guys that posted the solution.
I have an Acer TravelMate 3273 which has only DVD/CD rom.
All a sudden all the audio (DVD or CD) played has static noise. I spent weeks to try to look for information to fix it. Today I alreay decided to sent it for repair even though it is out of waranty already.
I tried another search by using “Notebook repair” and found this site. After some wild search, I got here. It solves my problem by following the suggestion. Since I have no floppy drive, I changed the primary channel instead of the secondary. I also had to restart the computer.
I then search the web to see if I find any cue that the mood was set to PIO. From the Microsoft Hardware help centre, I found out if the rom have a read error continuously for more than 6 times. WIN XP will change the mood setting from DMA to PIO. I had a read error due to a crash of a dvd rw formatted by Nero. Therefore my ATA mood setting was changed to PIO.
Therefore if you put an unreadable disc into your optical drive, make sure you check the ATA mood setting right away.
September 3rd, 2008 at 6:31 pm
OMG… thank you! It’s been nearly 2 years and I haven’t been able to play DVDs on this laptop. I was told I’d have to get a whole new DVD drive… and here it got fixed in two seconds!
Love it!
Thank you!