“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.
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August 30th, 2006 at 10:05 pm
My Toshiba Satellite wont recognise it has a dvd/cd player in the My Computer menu. I can put in a dvd and the light flashes but nothing happens. I have done System Restore without success and rolled back the driver but it said I already had the best driver. It is under warranty so probably my next option…
Any ideas?
Lyn
August 20th, 2006 at 11:25 pm
claude ranupas,
What is your laptop, is it Toshiba?
Usually you can reinstall a missing driver from a recovery CD/DVD disk. When you open it up, you should see a menu that allows reinstalling the driver.
The second option would be to download it from the manufacturer website.
August 19th, 2006 at 2:11 pm
By mistake I deeleted the sound program in the add/remove program/controlpanel.
Now I don not have any sound at all I can not find the hardware name for the sound device it shows “unknown” and therefore I can not find the driver PLEASE HELP!
PLEASE
August 11th, 2006 at 1:53 am
Hello, I’m a Microsoft certified technician stationed in Great Falls, MT. I have located a solution to this problem, dealing with the TS-L642C model drive. You need to upgrade the firmware on the drive itself to eliminate this problem. Visit this site and select the “TG00″ version to download. Then download the frashing application here . Create a shortcut to this flashing application, with a space and a “-nocheck” (with the “) after it. Execute the flashing app via the shortcut, select the downloaded firmware from the first link, and ignore any prompts about the software being “older”. Select the “start download” button at the top left corner of the flashing app, and your good to go after a quick restart.
August 4th, 2006 at 6:49 pm
If the dvd player is distorted on sound and image quality,try increasing the video ram,add 32mb and that should help,but it will reduce memory to the computer processor which will be 64mb,so if you have 256 it will only show 192 after the update,go to the toshiba downloads site and install the bio vid update,it was listed for my s1216 series,hope this may help
May 7th, 2006 at 10:19 pm
Rob,
Do you login to your laptop as an administrator? If you are logged in as an admin, you shouldn’t have a problem when you restore the driver. Have you tried the Roll Back Driver option? I believe it’s available only in Windows XP.
In the device manager locate display adapters. Right click on an available adapter and open properties. On the driver tag you’ll find Roll Back Driver. If you click on this button the video driver would be reverted to the previous installed version.
On the Toshiba website you should be able to find the video driver for your laptop.
BTW, I do not sell any laptop parts.
May 7th, 2006 at 8:50 pm
I am having a problem with my A10. I deleted the video drivers (there were two listed) by mistake (long story) and now whenever I try to restore them it tells me that it is denied access. I looked on the toshiba site and couldn’t see the drivers listed. The drivers are still on my machine I just need to get them to re-install. Can you tell me how?
Also do you sell power supplys / CD drives for a 4600?
Regards
Rob
May 6th, 2006 at 9:52 pm
Hey Pete,
Thank you for your comment. I’ll try it next time when I have to repair a laptop with the same problem. Fortunately, I didn’t spend any $$ because the laptop was under the warranty.
BTW, check out the comment 88 in this post. Do you thin that Peter experiencing the same problem?
May 6th, 2006 at 9:30 pm
The problem is actually much simpler to fix. I’m sorry you wasted many $$ trying to fix this problem.
The video and audio become choppy because the read/write mode on the ide controller for the drive (device 1) had somehow been changed to PIO mode (Program Input Output), instead of DMA. This puts all of the load of streaming data from the drive on the processor. and at 4.5 gigs for a movie that is a huge load.
The fix is to simply uninstall the secondary IDE controller from within Device Manager and reboot the machine. This forces windows to reinstall the drivers for the drive, and the default mode is set to Ultra DMA 2. Of course reistalling windows dd fix the problem, but at the cost of much time and patience.
April 19th, 2006 at 4:50 pm
how bout try to check your power options, Toshiba power options such as hard drive hibernation and power for the CPU, the power for the CPU might be also a factor because if you lower down the power input for the CPU you make the speed slower and therefore reducing computing power