CD Burner Question

[rraehal]

I have a CD burner. It is an external Lite-On eSAU208. The drive is a USB only device and is the version that draws power from the USB port. The drive has an LED that is blue with enough power and red when the power is low.

I connect the drive to laptops mainly. I have a Dell Latitude D810 and a Dell Latitude D830. CD's and DVD's work fine on both machines. A Dual Layer (DL) DVD will burn fine on the D830 but not on the D810.

If I burn a DL DVD on the D810 the verify process always fails. If I take a one of the burned discs and try to use it in another PC I can not read the disc.

I can burn the same data from the same network location on the D830 and everything works fine.

Both machines run Windows XP SP3 with all the updates.

Is there any way I can correct this odd behavior?

[Train]

Clean the lens using a Lens cleaner cd and burn a little slower so all the information gets on the disk.

I burn at 12X instead of 16X and that does the trick for me. But I make a point of making sure the lazer lens is clean too.

[rraehal]

I did try a slower burn. The drive allows me to select 3, 4, or 6x. I tried 6x at first and then moved to 3x.

I will run the laser cleaner cd. I have to bring mine from home because i do not have one here.

I purchased new DL DVD's. I am going to try another brand even though the brand I have now works on the one laptop and not the other.

I did verify that there are no firmware updates for my unit. I already have the latest.

I am starting to wonder if it is the USB ports on the laptop that have the issue. Maybe the drive and the USB hardware don't get along.

[Billforce]

I've had 2 laptops in the last month where the USB ports died, one didn't die completely though because sometimes on a start-up it will find the new hardware, USB ports but then when I start again they are dead. This seems to be a built in fault on laptops from what I've read, not indigenous to any brand.
It sounds to me like you are experiencing "low voltage" or low current on the laptop giving you problems. Check the voltage, it is critical because of the extremely low amperage of onboard usb ports. As a workaround (I've done it) is to use a powered hub to give full voltage to the USB ports.

[rraehal]

The CD came with a cable that can be used with 1 usb port or two. The second port is for pulling power from two usb ports at the same time. There is a LED on the drive that is blue when there is enough power and red when there is not. I have tried with one plug and two thinking about the same thing.

I am going to give up on this. I re-imaged the drive and installed a new cd burner app. The computer can not burn any cd. they all fail verification. i just burned everything on my pc. I will get a new laptop for burning discs. I just tried to resurrect the old computer for a useful task.