DVD drive problems

[OOBradm]

I have a LiteON DVD combo drive, and for about a year it's been acting odd and I've never been able to find the solution. First off, it can read any media (CD, DVD) but it can't burn anything. It used to be able to burn, but now when I try to burn it gives me any number of errors, including "please insert a blank disc" when there's a brand new blank dvd or cd in the drive, "Cannot burn," and things like that. I have tried using several burning programs, including the default Windows folder burner, Windows Media Player burner, several versions of Nero, and a few others. I'm convinced it's the hardware (and yes I'm sure they are blank CDs and DVDs).

On top of this, my computer often refuses to refresh what it thinks is in the drive. If I put in a CD (a game for example), the icon for the drive in "My Computer" will stay the icon of the last CD I had in the drive. For example I have a DVD Movie in the drive right now but the icon is showing the last disc I had in there. Refreshing doesn't change anything, and if I right click and eject it it still doesn't refresh. Sometimes it also refuses to eject the drive regardless of what's in there, even if it's empty. Pushing the eject button does nothing, right clicking on the drive and going to "eject" does nothing. It doesn't even give me any errors.

If I go to troubleshoot the drive it says that it's working properly. If I try to update the drivers it says they're up to date. My drive worked when I first installed it but since then my comp has gone through a number of changes so I'm not sure what could have caused it. Could this be an issue with the jumper setup on the motherboard? Is it some software issue where something is locking the drive (and is there a way to find out if something is?). I do a virus scan weekly with AVG free, and nothing appears to be wrong there.


cliffs
Drive can read but not write
Doesn't refresh disc information
I do not know what the cause is

 

[alzan]

Have you tried looking for/downloading and flashing the drive with the latest firmware? I suppose it's also possible that one the lasers in the unit has gone south and that's why it won't write but will read. The non-disc refresh could be caused by the lasers being bad also.

Do you have, or could you borrow from a friend a known-working optical drive; it doesn't have to be the same make/model of your drive? Install it in your PC and see if all functions work; if they do, the problem is unique to your drive. If not, then the problem is somewhere in your system (OS install, mobo drivers, etc.) Just to be thorough, you could also hook your "bad" drive into a known working system and test the drive functions.

I'm leaning towards the "your drive is bad, replace it" theory; it's also the easiest to figure out and the cheapest to replace.

alzan

edit: forgot to mention; you said you had tried multiple burning programs; if you have multiple burning programs installed that could cause a problem, imo.

 

[Poohbee]

try a different dvd burner. it might just be the dvd burner that is going bad. If the new one works, it means that the old dvd burner has hardware issues. Try newer firmware also. One other thing to look out for is to see if you have hooked up your dvd burner to a PCI IDE controller. FOr example, I had my dvd burner hooked up to a Maxtor (Promise brand) ATA-100 IDE PCI card and I didn't notice that most of these pci ide controller cards do not support ATAPI devices (cd-rom/cdrw/dvd/dvdrw etc). Not sure why.. but they just support IDE Hard drives. Anyways, I didn't realize that hooking it up to the pci ide controller would affect the Plextor dvd writer I had that much until I started burning stuff and it would be soooooooooooo slow and would give write errors, etc.

 

[ForumMaster]

it sounds like one of the lasers went bad. just replace it. they are really cheap. $38 for a top of the line, quite samsung drive that burns everything and uses the new SATA interface.

link for drive.

 

[Roguestar]

Buy a new one. You can get a jillion-format, billion-speed DVD burner for like $40.