Hatrack River Forum: Computer help please (DVD-RW drive)

This is topic Computer help please (DVD-RW drive) in forum Books, Films, Food and Culture at Hatrack River Forum.

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Posted by Speed (Member # 5162) on :

I have had a TDK CD-R/W drive for several years, and I just got a Sony DVD/CD-R drive a couple months ago. So it was working fine until a couple days ago, when I was watching a DVD on the new drive. I guess it hit a scratch and it froze the whole thing up. I waited a while for it to read it, but nothing happened and it wouldn't eject, so I shut the whole thing down with the task manager and ejected the disc.

Ever since then this drive has been absolutely terrible. It can barely read anything, and when it writes, the buffer keeps fluctuating from 0%-100%, and it takes about 7 minutes to burn a CD at full speed (supposedly 40x). I ran some diagnostics on it, and on my old still-functional TDK drive for comparison. Here's how they came out.

Sony burn profile
TDK burn profile
full Sony test results
full TDK test results

For the record, I've got 500 mb ram and a nearly 2ghz processor, and I'm running Windows 2000. Also, I have run AVG for viruses and Ad-Aware and Spybot. I've also shut down the computer, unplugged it, and even removed and re-installed the drive to see if it would reset anything. So far nothing has worked.

Any ideas what's going on? Thanks for the help.

[ April 11, 2005, 12:22 PM: Message edited by: Speed ]

Posted by TMedina (Member # 6649) on :

Have you tried uninstalling and reinstalling the drivers?

And did you check the Sony website for the most current driver release for your OS?

-Trevor

Posted by Speed (Member # 5162) on :

Haven't messed with the drivers. I'll try that. Feels like a physical problem, but then I'm not very smart, so I wouldn't be surprised if I was wrong. [Smile]

[ April 11, 2005, 12:37 PM: Message edited by: Speed ]

Posted by Speed (Member # 5162) on :

Wow, TMedina. You are, according to the best available evidence, the man. I don't know why a scratched DVD suddenly made my drive want some new drivers, but apparently that's what happened. Seems to be working fine now. Muchas gracias. [Hail]

Posted by TMedina (Member # 6649) on :

If I had to guess, stopping the program in mid-stride upset the software controlling the hardware, in this case the drivers.

Just a layman's guess though.

I'm glad it worked for you. [Big Grin]

-Trevor

Posted by rav (Member # 7595) on :

I bet what happend was it couldn't read it. It turned off UDMA, and reinstalling the drivers reset UDMA.

You might be able to look in your logs: Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Event Viewer.

I found a couple example errors for you.