CD/DVD burner help (completely stumped here)

[Interitus]

This might be a bit lengthy, so apologies ahead of time.

A few months ago I tore down my X58 rig and rebuilt it on water instead of air. Since the rebuild I've been having issues with my optical drives. Every time I try to burn a CD/DVD, the "Mastered Disc" or basically "finalized" disc option is greyed out when using Windows to attempt to burn a CD. CD's and DVD's read perfect, I just can't burn a disc at all. Even the non-finalized or non-mastered type fails to burn correctly. Since then, I've been using a USB burner that works fine when burning. This has also happened with 3 separate internal SATA drives, so I highly doubt it's the drives at fault here. It's got to be something screwed up in my BIOS or Windows.

The only change in the hardware was that I went down to one DVD-RW instead of a DVD and a DVD-RW. Other than that, it's the same hardware in the system.

Some relevant information:

-Using Windows 7 Pro 64-bit
-Drives were hooked up to the Jmicron controller on an EVGA X58 SLI (not Classified)

Things I have tried:

-Swapping the drives to the native Intel controller
-3 different drives pretty much eliminates the drives as the culprit
-Recently had to install Amazon MP3 downloader, tried to uninstall to see if this screwed it up
-Played around in the BIOS for settings that might help (neither IDE or AHCI mode works)
-New SATA cables

The most strange thing that happens is that if I use third party burning software, all of them show that I have an "incompatible drive" or "no compatible drive found"

Completely at a loss here, no idea what this could be.

Appreciate any help.

 

[C1]

Inspect the properties of the Optical drives and the controllers that they are on in device manager. An old trick with XP was to delete the drives then reboot and let windows reinstall the hardware and hopefully it would be recognized and install correctly. In your case, also delete the controllers the drives are on too then reboot.

 

[Interitus]

Well I did manage to figure something out after toying with it for the last 4 hours trying to figure out what in the @)$#@@)$# was wrong with this thing.

The board has 6 native ICHR SATA ports, 2 SATA ports on one Jmicron controller, and another single port on a second Jmicron controller that shares the eSATA port at the back of the board on the I/O plate.

The only way the opticals work is if I use the Jmicron controller with 2 SATA ports. They won't work on the second Jmicron controller, and they won't work on the ICHR ports.

I have no idea why. All of the ports are set to AHCI and Auto in the BIOS. If I change any of them to Enabled, it does nothing, same old story if I don't use the 2-port JM controller.

Also, if I use anything but the ports that work, in Windows I get the icon in the tray that usually pops up when USB or hot-swap devices are connected. The "safely remove hardware" icon. When I use the 2 JM ports that allow the opticals to work, I don't get that icon.

This wouldn't be a big deal except my cables won't reach the 2 working ports as-is.

Any idea as to why these won't function correctly on the ICHR?

 

[mfenn]

Did you try deleting the optical drives in the device manager and letting Windows redetect them like C1 suggested?

 

[Interitus]

Whoops, left that part out.

I did try, yielded the same results.

 

[mfenn]

Try booting a Ubuntu LiveCD and and see if you can burn a disc from there. That will help you rule out a BIOS issue.

 

[Interitus]

Will have to borrow another external, but I'll try that soon as I can.

Thanks for the help so far 🙂

Gonna keep toying around with BIOS settings to see if I can nail that down until I get my hands on the external.

 

[mfenn]

No problem. 🙂 You can also use UNetbootin to create a bootable Linux USB stick.