strange problem...vaio dvd drive

ok, here goes:

Friend from work wanted me to figure out what was wrong with his DVD drive in his Sony Vaio PCG-FRV25. He also wanted me to backup his data and format/reinstall XP. No problem, me thinks, as I invite him over to take care of it.

So I back up his data via network, then try to diagnose the drive. Because if its physically malfunctioned, I won't be able to boot to reinstall windows. When trying to access a disc through XP, I get an I/O device error. Device manager looks fine, and the drive is being recognized on My Computer. Never known XP to have problems with this. I tried the recommendations from here. No help of course.

I then check to see how bios feels about the situation. However, this version of phoenix bios is very lacking. The only thing of any substance is the boot menu which has optical drive, floppy drive (there isn't one anyway), hard disks, and network. They are in the usual move up or down for priority deal. Anyway, there is a pull down on hard disks to see the list of disks (only 1 in this case) however this is missing from optical drives. So I move the generic optical disk to the top and try to boot from XP cd. No luck, goes straigt to windows. I tried disabling everything except optical drives and it just gets stuck in a loop trying to boot from network (even though I disabled network boot here and on another menu). So I can't boot a cd!

I'm thinking the newer version of BIOS won't suck as bad as this one (R0108K7), but can't flash it since there is no floppy. Yes, they do require a USB floppy to flash this model. Tomorrow we are going to get a usb floppy to see what the deal is with a new bios. I even tried setting up my desktop floppy as a network drive and boot from it hehe.

I install the firmware update for the drive (a Matshita® UJ-810B DVD-RW) from
sony's site I can't seem to find the driver updates anywhere (sony, driverguide, google).

Anyway so we end up taking the damn thing apart (about an hour to get to the drive) after reading a bad connection could cause the I/O error. Well I had ripped out a drive from an older laptop and we tried it out and WINDOWS COULD READ THE DISC! yay. I'm thinking the original drive is just defunct now, but i'm not sure. However when I try to boot the XP cd from the working drive, I get the same result as before. Just goes straight into windows even though its set to optical drive.

Ok to boil down my questions:

1. Do you think the Original drive is goners? Or is it something I can fix?

2. Why can't I boot a damn CD from either drive!!??

3. Why can't I find drivers/info about this dvd+rw drive or the bios verison and CD booting.

Please help me if you have any insight at all,

Thanks,
Sean

well i just bought a usb floppy, I'm going to flash the bios (hopefully it can boot from usb floppy heh) and/or I'm thinkng boot from a startup floppy with cd drivers and try to load windows that way.

Any thoughts?

thanks

Another thing I have tried, was uninstalling the Secondary IDE contoller from safe mode....then windows reinstalls it, finds the dvd drive etc. but still can't read it. I'm thinking the old drive just isn't spinning. But how can I get the damn thing to boot from the working drive?

Try rippin out the Secondary IDE contoller again and the other one listed leave primary where it is.
When you rip out the 1st one DONT restart remove them both then restart...

same problem here. I cannot boot an installation CD from my optical drive
no valid information from vaio-link.com
help needed please

man. this is weird. im having the same problem. i just bought a new drive for it on ebay and to my dismay, same thing. please post or email me if you find the solution

sounds like it's the same problem i'm finding in my dad's vaio pcg-xg29. I just upgraded it from Win 98 to 2000 w/ SP4 and it's playing everything but the DVDs.