“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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July 18th, 2008 at 11:40 pm
thank you rob, it worked PERFECTLY!!!
i had no idea what else to do, and theres this problem on other sites but no one figured it out
June 9th, 2008 at 9:20 am
Thanks switching worked great…for those that need more help..
1. Right click on the “My Computer” icon on the desktop
2. Hit “Properties”
3. Hit “Hardware” tab
4. Push “Device Manager” button
5. Hit “+” sign next to “IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers”
6. Right click on “Secondary IDE Channel” and “uninstall”
7. Right click on “IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers” and “scan for hardware changes”
Computer should now re-install driver, right click and check properties of “Secondary IDE Channel” Under the “advanced properties” tab it should say “DMA if available” for transfer mode
June 5th, 2008 at 1:38 pm
i have trouble with the dvd being distorted on my toshiba satellite L25 S1215 also. I don’t have a restore cd since i bought my laptop at a pawn shop. What do I do to fix the dvd or where can get a restore cd?
May 21st, 2008 at 7:27 pm
I don’t have this particular laptop, but I have an Acer and the same thing is happening to it, and the same thing happened to my roommate’s Dell. How do I do this IDE thing?
March 8th, 2008 at 2:46 am
Thank you!!!!
I removed the second IDE channel. It was stuck in PIO mode. After uninstalling it, i scanned it for changes, it reinstalled and voila! DVD movies work perfectly again! I’ve had this problem for months with no luck until today. Thanks again.
December 17th, 2007 at 7:33 am
Removing the second IDE channel worked for me, too! But you don’t even need to restart…after it removes the channel, click on the parent IDE controllers (what the second IDE channel was nested under) and choose Scan for Hardware Changes. No need to wait for the reboot…it’ll work after that!
Thanks SO much for this fix!
September 13th, 2007 at 11:13 am
I had the same problem with play back and audio, uninstall the secondary IDE controller from within Device Manager and reboot the machine as per post 15 and it worked, holy pickles I was about to chuck this 2 bit laptop from the 11th floor…. Thank you!
June 16th, 2007 at 2:22 am
Just to confirm James s absolutely correct – I just performed the secondary IDE controller fix and it works.
Previously I had been in touch with Tosh Support (UK) who first suggested uninstall and reboot of the DVD drive, then (wait for it…) finally offered either a system restart (whcih they menetioned hd teh side effect of losing all 50GB of my personal data – or sending the machine in for them to have a look at – which would translate as being without a computer for three weeks and a big bill.
Thank you very much
p.s. Am I alone in liking this machine, but being very disappointed by common faults – I’m on the web it seems like once a month sorting out hardware issues… Can’t really recommend them…
April 10th, 2007 at 9:31 pm
James Zois,
Thank you. I didn’t know that. Next time when I have a similar issue I’ll try that.
April 9th, 2007 at 7:06 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.
Thank You!