From cdrinfo.com's forum, posted by robo21
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I am returning my second 24102B for exchange. Liteon has set a new record in my personal experience as being the most problem riddled piece of hardware I have ever worked with.
It all started about 2 weeks ago when my best friend finally convinced me to get the burner. He kept raving about how perfect it was and how he hadn't had a coaster yet. The price dropped to $80 which seemed like a reasonable price so I got one. It wasn't easy though due to the fact that I have 5 burners already.
So my reseller sent me an OEM unit instead of the retail-boxed model I had ordered. I installed the unit into my AMD TBird system which has thus far been extremely tolerant and accepting of any type of hardware I connected to it, including each of the 5 other burners I own.
The first issue was that the drive would not be detected by BIOS. Furthermore, the tray would not eject and the LED stayed on all of the time. Turns out the drive was DOA, but I didn't know this for sure until I had wasted many hours trying to make it work and visiting the Liteon website (it offers next to nothing) looking for help.
So the drive gets returned and the retail-boxed version arrives and we eagerly install it thinking and hoping that this one will be the burner of my dreams. Forget about it. This time the drive was detected in BIOS immediately. However, the tray would not eject and the LED remained lit continuously.
In doing our normal troubleshooting procedure, we determined that the digital audio cable was the culprit. If the digital audio cable was correctly connected the drive would not function correctly. So, I figured, "no big deal, I won't use the digital audio extraction." Alas, the problems did NOT end there.
I tried backing up one of my games which is protected with Safedisk v.2. First I used CloneCD. The drive sat there and made no progress whatsoever during the reading. It just whirred up to full speed and then down to idle and then up to full speed and then back to idle. Naturally, I theorized that it could be the software so I tried another hallmark of burning software, Nero.
The drive still did not read, and still it continued to whir up to full speed and then down to idle, over and over again. Then I tried another game that I had previously made a backup of successfully, this one protected by Safedisk v.1.
This time the drive made a flawless and exact copy of the CD in jaw-dropping time - 12 minutes! I was ecstatic, I thought there might be hope. Wrong again. I contacted Liteon and was told by the tech that Liteon Corp. was indeed aware that when a digital audio cable is connected to the drive, the drive will not function. Furthermore, I was told that Liteon has no intention of producing a fix for the problem. I was told that "the problem will not be corrected on this drive, it will be corrected in the successor model only."
Well this stinks, in fact, this is downright unethical business. These people manufacture a piece of hardware that does not function as it is supposed to and then NOT ONLY do they fail to fix the problem and have no intention of fixing the problem. But they won't even alert their customers that the problem exists!
So people buy the drive and find out the hard way that the digital audio cable, when connected, aborts the normal functionality of the drive. Or they don't realize this is the problem and return the drive to the reseller who, in turn, returns the drive to Liteon.
Now it gets scary. There are numerous posts on various forums about this issue. Furthermore, the person I spoke with at Liteon acknowledged that the problem is with all of the 24102B drives. Therefore, Liteon must be getting many hundreds if not thousands of drives returned (they produced and shipped 800,000 drives in November-I don't know how many of that number were the 24102B but you can be sure it was a very large percentage) so this means that Liteon is maintaining silence (no notification on, or with, new drives being shipped, and no notification on the website) on this issue for one reason - so they can maximize the profits on their bottom line by selling junk to the public. Well, there could be another reason, it could be that is cheaper for them to repack all the returns and reship them to unsuspecting buyers around the world. But again, it boils down to profit. My bottom line is this: Liteon does NOT care about the customer beyond the initial sale. Their lack of easily accessible tech support tells us that.
Getting back to my situation, the tech at Liteon suggested that I use a 'downgrade' of the firmware to get the drive to read Safedisk2 and SecuRom protected disks. I first loaded the 5S07 firmware in DOS, the software reported that the flash was successful, however the drive lost all functionality and just spun with the LED now continuoursly red in color. I then tried upgrading to my original firmware, again the software reported "success" but the drive failed to return to anything close to normal. Now the drive is completely useless.
I wish I had bought the Plextor 24X when it first came out. Back then it would have copied any protected CD with ease and even do Cactus. Now, with Plextor's firmware "advancements" their drive is useless in that regard. So, I will return this shoddy, bug-riddled piece of junk.
I would urge anyone in the market for a CD burner to avoid Liteon like the proverbial plague. Unless, of course, you enjoy spending your time resolving never-ending issues. And by all means, call or write these masters of high tech business and ask them why? Chances are our letters and emails will continue to be unanswered because this is one company that just wants your money and could care less about your satisfaction.
If anyone has a viable alternative I am open to suggestions. >>
I dont know about most people, but my Lite-on is doing great here. It it ever turns back on me, I'll switch to Plextor anytime.
Update: Here's a link to the thread and here is a fix if you have the same problem.
