One evening I am using my pc's DVD players to play Civ 4 and music CDs. The next morning neither DVD drive will load any type of media whether blank CD, audio CD, Civ 4 cd, or DVD. Both drives exhibit similar behavior: when I put a disc in my Samsung DVD-ROM I hear it begin to spin, then immediately spin down, then start to spin again, and again cut off after less than half-a-second, then it sits quietly; the Lite-On DVD-RW starts to spin, makes a short buzzing/zapping noise, spins down, then starts to spin up again and makes that noise again and then goes quiet. As far the PC is concered there is no disk in the drive in either case. Any attempt to perform any action on the disk gives the same result as when there is no disk; for example trying to play Civ 4, it asks to 'insert disk' while the disk sits idly in the drive. I made no software nor hardware changes to my PC the day before the problem.
According to my PC there is no problem. My Computer shows both drives. Device Manager shows both drives as working properly. The IDE controllers are also working properly. I can eject the tray from both drives through software. Event Manager shows no errors or warnings. As far as the PC is concerned everything is honky-dory! I have no problem with viruses or malware (using Avast! resident scanners and did a virus scan). My PC is a SONY VAIO desktop Model PCV-A11L, Windows XP SP2.
It seems that for some reason the CD drives are aborting the spin up process. Perhaps the PC is telling them to idle?
Please, I could really use some ideas on this one. I have scoured the web and seen this exact problem described other places over the last several years, but I have not seen it resolved. Thanks.