I was trying to watch a DVD on my laptop, but it wouldn’t work. I installed a free trial of a DVD player which cut off in the middle and demanded $14.95 to watch the rest.
I uninstalled that and installed a different free trial, which I could not get to work. So I uninstalled that, too.
The problem is, now the laptop won’t read my TEAC DW-224E “D” drive. I tried uninstalling and reinstalling the drive, and keep getting this message: “Windows cannot load the device driver for this hardware. The driver may be corrupted or missing. (Code 39)”. I can’t find an appropriate driver to reinstall on the TEAC site, either.
Anybody have a clue as to what I should do next? (BTW, the laptop is a Toshiba Satellite.)
UPDATE: Now it reads the D drive (I rolled back XP to its restore point) but I still can’t get it to play the DVD.
Try booting into Safe Mode (repeatedly hit F8 when the machine first starts and pick Safe Mode), uninstall the drive in safe mode, ten reboot and let Windows rediscover the drive and install the driver. Beyond that I’m not sure I can help you in an email.
Get videolan. It doesn’t have all of the stupid driver crapware that the commercial ones have, _and_ it uses a lot less processor than the commercial ones have.
Assuming you’re using XP, I would second HankP’s advice, but I’m not sure you need to be in Safe Mode. I recently installed a USB/Firewire card in a friend’s PC, then found it wouldn’t recognize an external USB/FW hard drive I hooked up. I deleted all the USB and Firewire devices associated with the card and shut down. When I restarted, XP reinstalled the drivers and recognized the external drive. To reinstall the drivers for the DVD drive, go to Control Panels -> System -> Device Manager. Locate the DVD drive in the list (you may have to click on a ‘+’ to find the Teac drive) and highlight it. Right click and select ‘uninstall’ from the pop-up. Verify your choice, close the control panel and shut the computer down. Next time you restart, XP should reinstall the device driver. This is much better than the bad, old days when you had to track down the installer disk and walk 3 miles to school in the snow, uphill in both directions. XP has remarkable self-healing powers. It has to because it’s so easy to break. N.B. I’m mostly a Mac guy these days (because of stuff like this), so if my advice doesn’t work, I’m not sure what you should do next.
By the way, do you know about this? They have both a Windows and a Mac version.
Buy a Mac.