It happens many times that new users in the forum ask for help without giving enough details about their optical drive. This is because it's difficult for the user to know drive features by only looking at the drive. Some people buy retail packages, that shows detailed information on the box, but many people buy OEM drives that have no info at all.
How to retrieve information about your optical drive then? There are two main ways: surf to the manufacturers website and search for detailed features, or use a tool that can analyze the drive, extracting all the info for you. Optical Info is one of these tools:
| The purpose of this utility is to detect the optical drive's (CD / DVD drives) Read/Write capabilities. When looking at the front of a computer which is not your own it is often difficult to tell whether the optical drive installed is either a CD ROM, CD Writer, CD Rewriter, DVD ROM, CD Rewriter + DVD Combo, DVD/CD Rewriter etc. |
There are other tools that allow the user to learn a lot about features for their the drive, some are freeware and others are shareware. But, they retrieve so much detailed information, that some people could find it intimidating. Optical Info is a very simple tool that will give only basic information on the drive, such as model, installed firmware, and reading/writing capabilities.
Another important feature of this freeware tool is, that it deos not require any installation, because it's sufficient to simply run it from any folder.
To read more and download this tool, take a look at the Optical Info webpage.
Source: Alex Nolan Freeware Software
