CD/DVD Burner Issue

[NickCat11]

I have a laptop here in which the customer says his CD/DVD burner will not read CD's anymore but reads and writes onto dvd's just fine. I confirmed the issue and then proceeded with the following diagnostics.

1. Uninstalled from device manager and reloaded drivers (after reboot)
2. Tried both cdr's and factory made cd's--nothing
3. Cleaned the lens
4. Confirmed DVD's work fine

It tries to read them then eventually just stops attempting providing no error message. The DVD's load perfectly fine. Any suggestions will be appreciated. Thanks.

 

[JosephLeo]

I have a laptop here in which the customer says his CD/DVD burner will not read CD's anymore but reads and writes onto dvd's just fine. I confirmed the issue and then proceeded with the following diagnostics.

1. Uninstalled from device manager and reloaded drivers (after reboot)
2. Tried both cdr's and factory made cd's--nothing
3. Cleaned the lens
4. Confirmed DVD's work fine

It tries to read them then eventually just stops attempting providing no error message. The DVD's load perfectly fine. Any suggestions will be appreciated. Thanks.

Maybe the drive isn't properly seated. It could be that the "write" pins are not really making a contact with the board. See if applying some pressure to the drive solves the issue.

 

[NickCat11]

Maybe the drive isn't properly seated. It could be that the "write" pins are not really making a contact with the board. See if applying some pressure to the drive solves the issue.

Forgot to mention I did that as well, sorry...

 

[JosephLeo]

Forgot to mention I did that as well, sorry...

Hmm...okay.

Did you try a different slim ODD?

 

[NickCat11]

Hmm...okay.

Did you try a different slim ODD?

I just swapped one in and it works fine. Not being that familiar with how the drives are mechanically I didn't think this scenario was possible. I thought they either worked or didn't.

 

[anonymous Mac Tech]

I just swapped one in and it works fine. Not being that familiar with how the drives are mechanically I didn't think this scenario was possible. I thought they either worked or didn't.

I see this frequently and 9 times out of 10 swapping the drive is all that can be done unfortunately. Optical drives have a variety of different ways of failing but the usual fix is replacement.

 

[MrUnknown]

I don't know the internals very well either, but I know that some drives can be picky after a while. I had a drive in my computer that read a DVD perfectly fine. The other compyter would fail. I got it to work be re-burning the DVD at the slowest speed possible.

Nevermind that any other disk I have made worked perfectly fine. ODDs can be odd.

 

[JosephLeo]

I just swapped one in and it works fine. Not being that familiar with how the drives are mechanically I didn't think this scenario was possible. I thought they either worked or didn't.

another +1 for Joe & Moe.

 

[Tweak]

I think this is somehow due to the calibration of the optical unit, replacement is really the only solution, but then old one becomes a great shop test drive.