G74SX-ST1: Two obscure issues

[jonfl1]

So I'm hoping someone in the community here has some ideas about what might be occurring with two seperate (and very annoying) issues I'm having with my G74SX-ST1:

1) My blu-ray drive will NOT read any media other than blu-ray discs UNTIL I put in a blu-ray disc. So basically, it will not read any CD-ROMs, DVDs, etc, until I play a blu-ray disc. After that, it reads any disc fine until I reboot. I should note that I dumped the default blu-ray player in favor of Cyberlink's PowerDVD 11.

2) Periodically, and without warning, my G74S will start acting odd, then blue screen. When I reboot the laptop, it doesn't recognize my boot sector OCZ Agility 3 SSD I have installed as the boot drive. After completely powering the system down and then starting it back up, I can then go into the bios and it recognizes the drive again, at which point I have to set it as the boot drive again.

I'm hoping that both of these are simple settings issues, and I strongly suspect that it is a software issue and not a hardware one. Any help or ideas with either of these issues would be greatly appreciated!

[xeromist]

Have you checked to see if there is a newer firmware for the SSD? Older OCZ firmware has had problems. No idea on the optical, sorry.

[jonfl1]

Thanks for the suggestion, xeromist. I'll check OCZ's site for a firmware update tonight.

[gilbert]

before i got my hyper x i did some research and i did read that people were having problems with OCZ ssd's with old and new firmware so if u still can i would return it and get something different , Intel is pretty reliable but pricey , about the OD try cleaning it with some compress air they get pretty dusty .

[jonfl1]

It can't be an issue with a dirty optical drive, because it reads other discs immediately after I insert a blu-ray disc. I'm convinced that this is some sort of software setting or conflict, but I can't identify what that is on my own.

[scuk1nho]

Try reinstall your Blu-ray drive drivers. Enter to "Device manager" select your drive, uninstall drivers and wait till windows automatically detect new device or restart laptop.

[gilbert]

jonfl1 wrote:
It can't be an issue with a dirty optical drive, because it reads other discs immediately after I insert a blu-ray disc. I'm convinced that this is some sort of software setting or conflict, but I can't identify what that is on my own.

i know but i think that cleaning it could help , also try uninstalling and installing the drivers again and if all fails a clean windows install is the best way to go.

[jonfl1]

Uninstalled the drivers, rebooted, then Windows reinstalled it. Same BD-ROM behavior... 😞

[jonfl1]

So I've yet to upgrade the firmware on my SSD, because per OCZ, you can't upgrade the firmware via their utility on a primary drive. Once I'm able to do this using another PC, I'll report back results on this thread.

I'd still appreciate other thoughts and ideas on the BD-ROM issue. Can this possibly be some kind of registry setting or program conflict?

[Peregrine]

Registry, doubt it.
I would try going back to the default player and see if you can reproduce the error there.