Pioneer 303S does not accept (any) DVDs

[maelkoth]

Hi!

I have a (pretty old) Pioneer DVD 303S drive that I did not use for some time, but now want to use for viewing DVDs again (using W2k).

The problem is, that the drive does not accept any DVD anymore. After putting the DVD into the drive it ejects the DVD after/during the initialization process without even opening the player or giving me a chance to access the DVD through explorer.

I have the feeling that the problem is related to the drive being jumpered to RPC1 and region code protection of the DVDs. I tried multiple combos of region selectors and players, but it appears that the drive does not care about it or the process never reaches the point when it requests the region code from the player.

Anyone seen this problem? Anyone knows a solution? I am hesitant to jumper the drive to RPC2 and lock a region code as I am viewing RC1 as well as RC2 DVDs.

Cheers,
Ma'ElKoth

[gd_nimrod]

I'd only try switching the jumpers if that was my last solution, and before you do that, have you tried downloading driver updates?

[maelkoth]

I still do not know what is wrong with the drive, but even switching to fixed RC setting did not help. I got a single DVD running on this drive and that was a RC0 (ie. RC free) DVD. All others kept failing.<BR>
So in the end I kicked out that old drive and got me a new one and now all works fine using Region-Free (even though the new drive is an RPC2 TEAC 516e).