Recently, I bought a DVD-ROM drive off of newegg to replace a dying generic OEM cd-rom drive.

I installed the drive without problems (installed it as slave and made sure it was jumpered correctly) Windows auto-detected the drive at the next boot and installed a driver.

The problem is that in Windows XP, I had (and still have) problems getting the drive to work correctly-- I had numerous I/O errors during file copying, DVD playback would not work in any player I tried (Windows cited a DRM problem), I can't play cd audio or rip an audio cd. I am also unable to run exes on any kind of disc (any executable I try to launch just crashes instead of loading)

On Linux (Ubuntu, to be specific) I had none of these problems. Everything worked the way it was supposed to, and the OS seemed to flawlessly adapt to the new hardware.

At first, I figured that the drive was defective, so I called Newegg and they sent me another one. I just got done putting the new drive in, and I'm having the same problems as I did the first time. My hunch is that it is a driver-related problem since the odds of getting two defective drives in a row seems about nil.

I tried googling for a better XP driver but I've found nothing so far.

Swapping a CD-ROM for a DVD-rom seems basic enough-- I've done it many times on other machines without problems, so I'm surprised that windows can't seem to handle it in this instance. Do any of you guys have any ideas on how to fix this?

Yeah, return it and buy something not Sony.

Not that I support Sony, but I've never had a problem with my DVD ROM drive in the three or so years I've had it.

I've got a Sony CD-RW drive, and the only problem I have with it is that the tray sticks when it has a CD in the tray, and it takes some coercing to open the damn thing.

Mine's an NEC. Works fine.

Did you try Sony's driver support?

You said you installed it as a slave. What else is using that bus?

I also have a DVD+RW drive installed as master on that bus.

Try temporarily unhooking the DVD+RW drive and see if you still get errors; it could be a conflict between the two drives being on the same ribbon. For whatever reason, while hard drive data stream formats were standardized, disc drives didn't get the same treatment, so conflicts can occur.

QM

Lite-On drives have never failed on me to this day.

hp dvd drives are also great