I have an older PC running as a file server using an Asus mobo raid controller that I’ve been afraid of updating. It also is the newest PC I have that still has an optical drive. I found some old discs I wanted to recover the data from, but Windows decided it could see the optical drive and assign it a drive letter, was happy with the driver, but did not want to actually read any discs. Fortunately, I too had a Cinnamon Mint USB on my desk, and a very old laptop with an optical drive that had an unbootable Windows 7 install on it. Fired it up and had it on the network and copying files from a DVD-R to my NAS in just a few minutes! Laptop is now running Mint and performs well :)
I have an older PC running as a file server using an Asus mobo raid controller that I’ve been afraid of updating. It also is the newest PC I have that still has an optical drive. I found some old discs I wanted to recover the data from, but Windows decided it could see the optical drive and assign it a drive letter, was happy with the driver, but did not want to actually read any discs. Fortunately, I too had a Cinnamon Mint USB on my desk, and a very old laptop with an optical drive that had an unbootable Windows 7 install on it. Fired it up and had it on the network and copying files from a DVD-R to my NAS in just a few minutes! Laptop is now running Mint and performs well :)