Hi I know there's umpteen different posts on Sony Optiarc driver issues - believe me I have read pretty much all of them and still can't find a resolution to my predicament.And at the moment it's stopping me from working from home.
I have a Sony NEC Optiarc AD-5170A in a Packard Bell ISTART 2311. Sunday just gone my computer decided to have a total failure and required the Packard Bell Recovery... so a clean back-to-factory installation followed. Since then my DVD-RW thinks it's a cd player and won't access any of my backup & current work dvds, nor even my Microsoft Office disk. Packard Bell say it's a software issue - the driver's a Microsoft signed one and they don't have any other version so advised me to call Microsoft. I called them and they said I need to go back to Sony. They says it should be FOC from Microsoft or from Packard Bell. Packard Bell couldn't even find my machine at first then did - and referred me to Acer support, who remoted my PC to check: "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318} - and delete any "upper filters" and "lower filters ... Only Acer have confirmed - my machine doesn't HAVE any upper or lower filters. So that's not the issue. I ended the call when they offered to tweak my registry for about an hour, for the price of a new PC.
Does anyone actually have a fix for this Optiarc issue, or is the only solution to pay through the nose for either someone to remotely play around with my registry - or fork out a small fortune for a bog standard Windows DVD driver? Or, as I suspect, is the cheapest option to go to PC World and buy a new drive...