did BOTH my cd drives die?

Hi all,

I have two optical drives in my system...an asus 48x burner and a nec 4x dvd burner...when trying to burn a file approximately 700mb's in size (in my asus drive first), i opened nero, began to burn, and the drive would just spin up, spin down some, and spin up some again...this would keep going back and forth, with both the read and write lights on the cd drive blinking...i coudlnt' close nero, couldn't eject the cd....so i restart, and try to burn the cd in my dvd drive...when that happens, i get a "power calibration error" and the burn process fails...is there anything i could check software-wise to see if that is the problem before i assume that my cd burner and dvd burner simultaneously died?

I've already installed the latest aspi layer and that didn't seem to do anything...no spyware/viruses also...thanks for the input

Check that your IDE drivers are intact. Then the usual hardware suspects (bent pins, different cable, jumpers). Also see if these drives have firmware updates.

**update**

my dvd burner seems to be burning cd's ok now, i'm still not 100% sure its ok tho, i haven't tried burning a dvd yet, that's my next step...but the cd drive is still not able to burn a cd...however, it can read discs...i was able to boot to the "ultimate boot cd" and that worked ok

sm8000,

thanks for the advice, i'll check those things, but i just dont understand why my cd drive was able to burn fine 3 days ago, and now it just wont work...

when i tried to burn w/alcohol 120% i got the same results as with nero...the drive spins up, oscillates between a med-high and high spinning, and just sits there until i cold-restart the computer

Have you tried different discs?

I have a friend whose Pioneer DVD-ROM wasn't working - it would simply eject discs after a few seconds of trying to read, then giving up. A firmware update cured it, telling me what was on the chip got corrupted somehow. Probably from spilled beer ;)

sm8000,

i have tried about 8 different discs...one time i got it to start "burning" a file after about 2 minutes of it whirring up and down w/the lights blinking like mad, but even though it completed "successfully", it was unreadable by any other cd drive i have, telling me that it didn't work at all...at one point another drive recognized the burned disc as a blank disc, so i have no idea...

i seized the opportunity to get a sony cd-rw for 32 bucks w/free shipping on newegg.com, just in case i can't get this to work :(

What are you trying to burn?

I've had problems with bad disc images affecting performance.
Also, by different disks, he might have meant different brands. Personally, I've had 10 cent disks work just as well as 50 cent disks, but I have known people that just couldn't get certain media to work with their burners.

Checklist:
Disks-
Image-
Drivers/Firmware-
Software-
Physical Connections-

If you double check all of those and it still doesn't work then you probably have a bad drive.

Kayden,

at this point i am thinking it is abad drive..i've tried different files to burn w/the same result...and the cd's are from the same brand of cd's my burner has used for over a year w/o problem...at this point, because everything was working fine, and stopped, and i didn't do anything to change the configuration of my computer, i'm thinking the drive is bad...

btw is it a normal occurance to have a cd burner that is able to read cds but not burn them?

I've seen that quite a few times. The cd drive will be working, and everything will be great, but when you try to write a cd, it fails. However, they continue to read cd's with no problems.

just a suggestion but I have had to uninstall Nero and reinstall before because it becomes corrupt. You might try that its simple and doesn't cost anything.

At first I was going to say reinstalling nero wouldn't do anything because he also has alcohol 120... but then that got me thinking.

I've seen corrupted installations of nero that would 'successfully' burn blank CDs.

I've had Clone CD, CDRWin, Fireburner, Nero, and disc'bumbler' installed at the same time without problems, but they would occasionally bicker about seeing another burner. Perhaps along the way someone's toes got stepped on and they aren't sharing nice :rolleyes:.
If thats the case, try uninstalling all of your burning software, remove all the drivers you may have for your drive and then physically remove it. Then get the latest drivers for you drive and reinstall it. Finally, test it by instally only one burning prog.

Duh... have you tried cleaning the laser?:D There might be enough dirt to obscure the writing, but leave the reading un affected.

I have the same problem with my NEC burner.

This only occurred after installing the latest firmware.

On the website of NEC they suggest a number of solutions to help this problem.

Maybe it will help you.

http://www.necd.de/faq_detail.php/id/573/frage/302

:t

You can try cleaning the laser with one of those "head cleaning" CDs that has a brush on them. It has "magically" resurrected drives for me on occasion.

Sagging PSU lines could also be at fault.

Thanks for all the replies...

I replaced the drive with a sony 52x burner, but I still want this 48x burner for a possible future computer, so I will look into one of those cleaning cd's.

thanks again :)