Suddenly unable to play Blu-Ray discs on laptop

[nourita]

Apologies if I’m not in the right place.

I purchased an external DVD and Blu-Ray drive for my laptop a couple months ago. It played both regular DVDs and Blu-Rays wonderfully. Today, however, whenever I inserted a Blu-Ray disc, the ‘BD-ROM Drive (E: )’ feature in Image 1 would completely disappear and I would see Image 2 as a result. When I eject the disc, the feature comes back and my screen returns to Image 1. As a result, I’m unable to play any Blu-Ray discs because there’s obviously nothing there for any media players to pick up on and run. I can play regular DVDs and CDs just fine and that ‘BD-ROM Drive (E: )’ feature doesn’t disappear, only with the Blu-Rays does this now happen. I don’t understand why because it was only two weeks ago that I was playing Blu-Ray movies without any issues. I don’t know what to do, can anyone help?

Many thanks.

[Bruce]

Just to state the obvious, what sort of Blu-ray discs have you tried?
Ones you have burnt yourself, or shop bought movies?
Have you cleaned the laser inside the tray, is the Blu-ray disc scratched or has any organic rot showing between the plastic layers?

[nourita]

Just to state the obvious, what sort of Blu-ray discs have you tried?
Ones you have burnt yourself, or shop bought movies?
Have you cleaned the laser inside the tray, is the Blu-ray disc scratched or has any organic rot showing between the plastic layers?

Hi Bruce, thanks for your response! They’re just shop bought Blu-ray discs. I don’t believe there’s any issues with the Blu-ray discs because I tried to play Blu-ray discs that I have played before successfully and none of them played this time round. And regular dvds and cds still play without any issue. I haven’t tried cleaning the laser inside the tray, I didn’t know you could so I can try to look into that but do you think that’s the issue if the player can still run normal dvds and cds successfully? If the laser was affected, wouldn’t that interfere with running those too?

[Bruce]

This should get you started; cleaning blue ray laser at DuckDuckGo

Basically eject your disc tray, and skip the video to around 4:00minutes.
You don’t care about how he pulls apart his DVD unit.

You will need some cotton buds (Q-tips) and some Isopropyl (rubbing alcohol) to clean the lens.
Also try a microfibre cloth and wipe the discs, in a circular motion, following the ‘groove’ in the plastic (like you would with a vinyl record if you are old enough to live through that era).

Do those Blu-ray discs work in another Blu-ray drive, if you have another?

[Bastet]

This is for CD/DVD so may or may not work for Blu Ray:
Try this too:
Right click Start>Run & type regedit & click enter, find HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Class{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}
Click on this folder - {4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318} & under the right-hand pane right click on UpperFilters & choose delete. If the filter is named UpperFilters.bak then please do not delete this.
If there is no UpperFilters entry then proceed to delete the LowerFilters entry.
Close regedit & reboot your PC.

If this doesn’t work try this fix by Kapil Arya:

Try these steps:

1. Open the Command Prompt with administrative privileges.
2. Type the following command and hit Enter key:

reg.exe add “HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\atapi\Cont roller0” /f /v EnumDevice1 /t REG_DWORD /d 0x00000001

1. Exit the Command Prompt and reboot. Insert a disk to test and the optical or DVD drive should be visible now.

[Bruce]

@nourita - any luck?

[Bruce]

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