CD/DVD burner only playing/burning some tracks

[karenms22]

I recently had to do a fresh install of windows vista on my HP computer. Originally, I thought the drive was bad, but realized it was a software issue. Because I had all my important stuff backed up, I did a fresh install and added a 1TB (I had bought to replace the drive) hard drive to store media on.

Its been about a month, and yesterday I bought some new cd's. I went to load them into itunes, and although it went through the motions of ripping the songs off the cd, the first song took about 10-15 seconds, and downloaded correctly, but then in the next 3 or 4 seconds it would go through the next 4 or 5 songs, put the green check to them as if they had been downloaded, take 10-15 seconds, properly download a song, then just repeat. When I went to play the songs, the little icon that sits highlighted next to the song playing would skip around the songs like it was shuffling and only stop on one of the two songs that actually downloaded properly. This happend with all cds, old and new. (I already have about 110 cds loaded into itunes). I also took a working cd/dvd drive out of another computer and got identical results. The same thing also happens when just trying to play a cd, not even trying to rip it.

What have I done?
tried a different cd burner
tried ripping with roxio creator 2010 premium
tried uninstalling the drive through the device manager
tried deleting the upper and lower (whatever they were called) in registry editor
tried doing a system restore
tried using old and new cds
tried uploading new drivers

My hair is going grey fast!!!!! this absolutely drives me nuts. I really want my player to work properly, and I think we can rule out a bad drive. I'm not very computer literate, I do a lot of reading and learning, so the more detail, the better for me.

Thanks in advance for all your help

 

[karenms22]

I solved my own problem....finally found a thread that was similar to mine.

I downloaded a free program called DriverMax. This program goes in your computer and looks for hardware that needs updates. I paid the $10 to get unlimited downloads....they normally allow 2 free per day. Anyways, although I had gone through all these things in my device manager and selected the option to update drivers, windows came back saying they were all up to date. Drivermax went through and I have tons of hardware that needs updating.

However, the key to this problem was teh NVIDIA nForce Serial ATA controller was out of date. As soon as I downloaded and installed the updated driver from DriverMax, my computer is back to normal.

I've spent hours on this, and its great to have it resolved. Really, all in all, this whole thing was fixed in 5 minutes. Hope this helps someone.