which model dvd rom do I have?

[jmar76]

To anyone who can help me, I'd really appreciate it. I have an older Sony Vaio SR5K that I bought a sony dvd rom for this week on EBay. The problem is I'm not sure which one I actually bought. Let me explain, there appears to be some kind of purple manufacturer's sticker on the top of it that says pcga dvd51/a, but on the front of the unit it says pcga dvd51. I called Sony, and the difference between the two is the speed of the drive, otherwise they are the same kind, but for driver purposes I need to know which one I have and Sony couldn't answer that for me after being on the phone with them for over an hour. Can anyone tell me any way I can know for sure? Should I go by the manufacturer's sticker on the top, or should I go by what it says on the front, or is there another way to tell? Thanks again to anyone who can help.

[Stuge]

Welcome to Sonyinsider !

if you're using XP or any newer OS,then it should recognize and install the dvd rom on its own .

[sfbp]

Programs such as Nero which take full advantage of different advanced features of various optical drives will interrogate the drive and you don't have to worry. Sort of like Stuge said, but even more dynamic than that.

Have you got trouble getting it to function?

"Conventional" drives will have jumper configurations but this should not even arise in a laptop. If this is a second hand drive you may have a region problem. Typically the region can only be changed 4 times, and if your drive came from some other region of the world or was set deliberately to be :out of country: then you may not be able to play DVD's with the country/region encoding (most commercial DVD's).

Won't affect the data abilities though. But since it is a ROM not a writer presumably you want it mostly for movies?

You may have gotten a fool in tech support when you called them. I could be wrong, but oftentimes /x stands for a color. For example /s silver /b black /r red.

[jmar76]

Stuge and SFBP,

Thanks to both of you for your help with this. It uses Windows 2000 (told you it was older lol) and the dvd rom drive is an external drive made by Sony for several models of Vaios that had no built-in cd or dvd drives of any kind. I bought it because I have some private info on that laptop and I need to run the Vaio's recovery cd before I can get rid of it and get myself a new computer because certain things are not able to be deleted from my hard drive due to some "stacked" error? I don't know what that means but it will not let me delete certain things so I'm gonna run the recovery cd. Problem was with this laptop, you MUST have either a compatible Sony cd-rom, cdrw, or dvd rom to run the recovery cd, a 3rd party cd-rom or otherwise will not work. So I bought it thinking it would be a piece of cake, then when I called Sony and the guy told me that the difference was that the Sony pcga dvd51 is an 8x speed drive while the pcga dvd51/a is a 4x speed drive, so he may or may not have been right about that. But the problem I run into is that since I need to run the recovery cd, from everything I've read online, once I run it I then have to re-install the drivers for it so that it will continue to run again and I was trying to find out which model it actually was before ordering the drivers disk from Sony. Thanks again.

Programs such as Nero which take full advantage of different advanced features of various optical drives will interrogate the drive and you don't have to worry. Sort of like Stuge said, but even more dynamic than that.

Have you got trouble getting it to function?

"Conventional" drives will have jumper configurations but this should not even arise in a laptop. If this is a second hand drive you may have a region problem. Typically the region can only be changed 4 times, and if your drive came from some other region of the world or was set deliberately to be :out of country: then you may not be able to play DVD's with the country/region encoding (most commercial DVD's).

Won't affect the data abilities though. But since it is a ROM not a writer presumably you want it mostly for movies?

You may have gotten a fool in tech support when you called them. I could be wrong, but oftentimes /x stands for a color. For example /s silver /b black /r red.

[danieljones2006]

I had a Sony DVD RW. It was a fine piece of DVD writer and served me well but lately i am facing problems with it's tray getting stuck now and then. Can you help me find a solution for the same???