2 dead dvd drives???

Kelsenellenelvian · Post by **Kelsenellenelvian** » Sun Aug 29, 2010 9:26 pm

Hey anyone ever heard of this?

BOTH of my lite-on dvd burners went out this last week :S

When I put a disk in of ANY type they spin and spin and spin then disappear from the explorer window...

Yes I have used different sata cables, different sata ports and everyting...

(They are like 2 years old though)

It's just funny they went at the same time.

shiner · Post by **shiner** » Sun Aug 29, 2010 10:50 pm

Your occurrence does seem farfetched--but I guess possible.
A few things you can try:

1.Try installing one of the drives in a different PC to eliminate your PC as the cause.

2.Re-flash the drives firmware.
Download the last version of the firmware for your drive from the Lite-on site and try to re-flash the firmware. Best done after booting into Safe Mode and no disc should be in the drive.

2.IF, you backed up the drive's EEPROM after the drives were installed you can try re-flashing the EEPROM. only do this if 2. doesn't work.
If you didn't make a backup yourself, forget it. Don't use the EEPROM backup from a different drive of the same model.

Luckily, non- blu-ray optical drives are no longer expensive.

(actually I not sure if recent optical drives still use an EEPROM , check your model first.)

Kelsenellenelvian · Post by **Kelsenellenelvian** » Sun Aug 29, 2010 11:39 pm

I did buy them at the same time though. Maybe they are from the same batch.

Yeah new ones will run me 18-20 bucks each...

Kelsenellenelvian · Post by **Kelsenellenelvian** » Mon Aug 30, 2010 1:08 am

Update.

Flashed the drives. NO-GO Using either the newest firmware or the factory def firmware.

Don't have another pc to move them to right now.

mr_smartepants · Post by **mr_smartepants** » Mon Aug 30, 2010 1:35 am

I managed to kill my plextor dvd burner when we got hit with a power outage while burning a disc. The drive kept failing with a "alignment" failure. I never did get it fixed. But now I have an APC battery backup!

It's a pain, but nothing with moving parts ever goes on forever. New ones are dirt cheap.
I just bought a new samsung dvd burner even though the one in my rig is only 18 mo old.

armond · Post by **armond** » Mon Aug 30, 2010 6:51 am

Hello,
Just a suggestion: try to run a bootable CD, for example, a Windows installation CD by using those drives. Can you do that?
Remove the drives from Device Manager\DVD/CDRom and reboot. Windows should detect them again. See the results.
Rename your atapi.sys in the Windows\System32\drivers to something and let Windows to replace the original version.
Let us the results... Interesting!

Post by **user_hidden** » Mon Aug 30, 2010 7:23 am

have you tried to unplug power from the pc (not just turn off).
then while plug is not in wall press the power button on the pc to discharge any power still
kept in the capacitors. replug the pc to the wall and power up. see if they are working now!

i have seen the problem before with other brands and the simple task above fixed them.

if not......computer store for a new purchase.
happily drives are much cheaper today than they were in the past.

Kelsenellenelvian · Post by **Kelsenellenelvian** » Mon Aug 30, 2010 7:33 am

Amen to the cheaper part

I have done everything suggested tonight except try them in a new machine.

ccl0 · Post by **ccl0** » Mon Aug 30, 2010 8:53 pm

if they were both in the same system maybe a power surge zapped them.

or maybe the laser that reads the disks got mis-aligned somehow. i can't think of how it would happen in every day use however

newsposter · Post by **newsposter** » Tue Aug 31, 2010 12:49 pm

it happens.

It's also why I always dig though a stores hard drive inventory looking for drives from different production batches. I often buy new drives 2 and 4 at a time.

The 'big boys' so this on a huge scale for their disk drive arrays. Can you imaging petabytes of disk storage on disk drives that have the same mtbf, same hours of expected life, and all started spinning and were powered up at exactly the same instant? Now multiply that paranoia by several hundred or thousand drives in a single installation.

Yes, Raid 1, 5, 6, and 10 helps. But if some simple design engineering and material purchases can reduce one or several risk factors, why **wouldn't** you do it?

crashfly · Post by **crashfly** » Tue Aug 31, 2010 9:56 pm

Yep, it would seem all of the suggestions I would give have been tried already (except the different machine one). But hey, new equipment is fun.

Edit: I did forget to mention though, you might have a power supply starting to go bad and it just happened to be the line that had your optical drives. Just an FYI.

HighTop · Post by **HighTop** » Wed Sep 01, 2010 2:51 am

He Kelsenellenelvian,

Maybe this is some kind of help:

http://support.microsoft.com/gp/cd_dvd_drive_problems

Greetz,

HighTop