Topic: burner won't play discs!?

[muddguts]

My Sony burner is acting up on me. It will not play audio discs anymore but it will still burn and I can open up data discs with it.

is there anyway to troubleshoot these things or are they toast when things like this happen?

[Evil Taper]

You might wanna try uninstalling the drive via your hardware manager and reinstalling it.  Otherwise it's probably about time to get a new one.  Normally when a drive is worn out it either doesn't spin up the discs or just spins them endlessly.  You can get CDRW drives for dirt cheap though and don't worry about brands because you'll never use it once you get a DVDRW drive.  Check out pricewatch.com or newegg.com for some good prices, might as well pick up a couple of round IDE cables with your order too if that dealer offers them so you can clean yer case up too...those are like $5 and let your case keep cooler too.  Other than replacing the hardware though there's not much you can do.

[kskreider]

Has it ever played audio CD's before? 

Maybe you just need an internal S/PDIF cable to go from the back of your drive to your sound card or motherboard.

If you are just gonna go out and get a new drive, spend $50 and get a NEC 16x DL DVD-R/W.  IT burns CD's DVD's...You name it.

You'll never look back.

...Kk

[muddguts]

thanks for your replies and your suggestions!
The burner has worked flawlessly for at least a year now both burning and playing audio discs but like many other traders, I really give this thing a work out! 
It still burns discs right now so I'll keep it until a new one is in the budget.

As for DVD burners, I don't burn movies and I seldom watch music videos but it might be a good idea to get for the larger storage.

[momule]

at this point your gonna pay the same ammount for a CDRW as you will for a DVD writer.
newegg has a great deal on the NEC right now. which I believe a few folks on here including myself run with zero prob's..

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16827152053

[muddguts]

at this point your gonna pay the same ammount for a CDRW as you will for a DVD writer.
newegg has a great deal on the NEC right now. which I believe a few folks on here including myself run with zero prob's..

Sounds like a great deal if you live in the U.S. I'll have to look around the Canadian sites.