Problem w/ dvd drive on 2 month old FE790

I am a leukemia/transplant patient who will have a two week window to fix my new Vaio FE790 dvd drive problem.

It will not play a complete DVD. It plays ok the first 2/3 of the dvd and then it gets 'stuck'. The only thing that will get it working again is to cntrl-alt-del and delete it. The same thing happens on all commercial disks I tried.

I have installed the latest bios, drivers for the unit and latest upgrade on the player. It also sticks on Windows MM 11.

I am not in a position to test other aspects of the drive.

It is a Pioneer DVR-K16VAD.

Is this a common problem with this laptop?

 

Did this issue only start happening after you updated the BIOS and drivers for the optical drive? That may be the issue.

Perhaps you could try a system restore and test out the older drivers first. If that fails, you can consider flashing back to the orignal BIOS to see if that works.

Beyond that, my suggestion would be to troubleshoot with Sony Support.

 

I had the problem before trying new driver and updating. I do not know before the bios update.

I would guess it is hardware related because it reads the beginning of the disk just fine, it gets 'stuck' towards the end.

I got this to keep me sane during my months long stay in isolation in the hospital. Has Sony quality gotten so bad that it will not even last a few months.

Any suggestions for better quality.

 

I didn't know Sony use Pioneer drives... I always thought that they just use Panasonic drives.

 

Some modification to my recent frustration:
1. Older (Dahlgliesh) original will not work.
2. Fargo worked ok except scene selection.
3. Private Ryan worked ok.
4. No commercal copies worked. (so I take originals to the hospital with all the exposure).

Seems like Microsoft and the movie industry are winning. I guess that means more business for Netflix and less for dvd producers.

 

I'm starting to think that perhaps the laser is unable to slide all the way to the outside--and therefore is unable to read the endings of movies (and perhaps the scene selection part of Fargo).

Either way, like I mentioned earlier I think Sony Support is the way to go. If it's going to need replacing you're going to have to go through them one way or another.