“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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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