Topic: TSKB: DVD burner burns fine but won't read anything?

[Teen Wolf Blitzer]

Any help appreciated.  It's an external Sony Dual Layer burner.  The silver one.  Relatively new.  Shows up fine in my computer.  Device manger shows it as fine.  Uninstalled and reinstalled the driver.  Nada.  Won't read cd's, comercail cd's or dvd's.     My internal DVD-rom does the same thing.  The discs I burn read and open up just fine on my work pc's so the discs seem to be ok.  Any ideas?

[Gordon]

sounds like it's dying.  my NEC did the same thing.  would burn but couldn't read shit.

[kskreider]

Pack it up and get a new one, its done.  I have had this happen to two Sony DL DVD-R reader/writers.

[Chilly Brioschi]

Laser rot?!

It can't hurt to spray a can of compressed air inside, but with decent drives under $30 now, why not just swap it out?

[OFOTD]

External burners can get out of alignment pretty quickly.  It sounds like your read laser is misaligned so that what is causing the difference in what you can burn or read.   The write laser is a much stronger pulse which helps it to make up for small misalignment problems that when the drive reads with a smaller pulse it isn't able to make up the misalignment.

If you want to keep the drive external you can always pull out the current drive and use a new on in the same case.  Just make sure when you buy a new one that you check and see if the current case accepts a SATA or IDE drive.

While shopping for a new drive the new NEC's are real nice drives.  LG is also making some nice drives but only for certain models.

Check out http://www.cdfreaks.com/ for some real intensive reports and reviews on current drives.

[ArchivalAudio]

Mark
no
words of wisdom here...
except good luck!!!
and don't buy another sony! or an hp

I have a pioneer that I like
but you know plextor is the way t
have a yamaha CD burrner that is also very good

-- Ian

[Sebastian]

but you know plextor is the way t

Not any more! They stopped making their own drives over a year ago. What you can buy under the Plextor name these days are mostly re-branded drives from other manufacturers. Pioneer is still making excellent drives, though.

My old Plextor died last week, so I got an LG GH-22. I only did some basic tests, but the read/write quality seems to be very good. And it's damn fast, too.