DVD/CD-RW Drive not reading CD-RW's

Hi,

My DVD/CD-RW Drive has suddenly stopped recognising blank rewritable discs. CD-R discs are working with no problems at all. Can anyone offer me some advice to what the problem could be?

Thanks for any help.

 

i am using the same cd-rw that i have used successfully before

 

I'm using XP. I have uninstalled the drive and rebooted and still no improvement.

 

The same disks or the same brand? I would not rule out that you have a bad batch of disks. Have you burnt to this batch before? They may have changed the layer composition since you got them last time (to increase the burn speed). I was looking at firmware upgrades for burners, they were mainly for compatibility with newer media. You may need a firmware upgrade. Do you have an old disk to try?

There will be a recommendation for the most compatible disks at website for the drive's model.

You could try uninstalling the drive and the IDE controller in Safe Mode. They will be automatically reinstalled when you reboot. Maybe uninstall the burning software at the same time.

Do you get an error message (please insert disk, I suppose)?

If you suspect that it is a faulty drive, try connecting it to another computer.

What is the brand and model number? Maybe we can search for similar problems.

Matt

 

i think i have a faulty drive. I have just tried a CD-RW that i burned using my CD-RW drive and the drive just isn't recognising the disc. (I can hear the drive make that 'chugging' sound after i have inserted the disc.)

Is there something on the drive settings that I could have changed that could be responsible, or is it just time for a new burner?

By the way, the drive is a Samsung sm-332b.

I'll try uninstalling the drive and the IDE controller in Safe mode now and see if that has any positive results.

Thanks for your help.

 

Also, try a cdrom drive laser lens cleaner. It looks like a cd with a bunch of toothbrush bristles on it and will clean off the dust which builds up on the lens.

Here is a laymans explanation of burners and disks. While not exactly technically accurate, it gives you an idea of how things work.

When an optical disk (CD, DVD) is made commercially; an acrylic disk is covered with a layer of metallic foil and a mechanical press stamps this foil to make pits. which will reflect the read laser differently than the flat undisturbed surface. This foil layer is then covered with a protective surface (in some cases another acrylic layer in others merely a label). Damage to the lower acrylic layer can be polished out, but if the top layer is damaged and the foil marred, the disk is not repairable.

Now we come to Recordable optical disks CDR and DVDR either + or - (the difference I will cover later)
The lower acrylic disk has a spiral groove cut in it and an optically sensitive (changes color when exposed to the right frequency and power of light) dye is put in this groove and then covered with either reflective foil or a doped layer of acrylic to accomplish "total internal reflection" as is done in fiber optics, where the refraction caused by the medium change will completely reflect certain frequencies of light (but be transparent to others) . The burn laser burns this dye , thus changing its color and hence the ability of the read laser light to pass through it . Once burned, this dye cannot change back ; so disks may be burned but not erased.


Rewriteable disks are similar , but use a liquid crystal (or liquid metal ) in place of the light sensitive dye; which at one power level will crystalize in one direction causing light to scatter, and when hit with a more powerful level will remelt and return to the original reflective state.

Now how does the drive know what type of disk it is? In the very center (all optical disks start at the center and work outwards) is a thin metal ring with the information needed for the drive to know what type of disk it is, what speeds it is designed to be burned at , and what power levels are needed to read, write, rewrite, erase etc as applicable. Then there is a "test" area for "calibration" of the needed lasers .

So now you know the difference between the different types of disks and how the drive determines which you have and what it needs to do to use them (note that this explains the calibration failed errors, if the calibration area of a write once disk is full or if the laser cannot meet the requirements of the disk you are using you get a calibration error). But what is the deal with the + and - .
Well these are "formats" or different manners in which the data is saved.
Just like when they first came out with video tapes there were two competing standards Beta by Sony and VHS by Phillips because of licensing restrictions of the original format so two different groups came up with differing standards for recording to DVDs. DVD-R was first, but some companies did not like the licensing and royalty scheme so they came up with their own format DVD+R . Think of it this way, one format the spiral is wide and the burn is perpendicular to the direction of the groove. The other the spiral is narrow and the burn is in the direction of motion. So in one you have a bunch of ------ along the spiral to represent data, and the other they are | | | | . Likewise, one may locate the position of an entry by dividing the whole disk into pie slices and then give a slice and ring number; while the other may just give a linear distance along the spiral relative to set points of reference.

Now obviously you cannot burn one format on a disk designed for the other and you cannot burn one with a drive designed to burn the other. So many modern drives can burn either format depending on which type of disk you have.
DVD-R disks tend to be cheaper, but DVD+R tend to support higher burning speed.
So what about burn speed? Well for a blank disk, the burn speed represents the fastest speed at which the manufacturer guarantees that you can burn data. This has to do with several factors, but think of it as some dyes and liquid metals require less energy to change state while others require more power or a longer burn time . So the shorter the time it takes to alter the dye, the higher the burn speed

When you put a disk in the drive, it reads the ring at the center, which tells it what type of disk is in there, it adjusts itself to properly deal with that type , then it signals the CPU that a new disk has been put in and what type . The CPU then tells it to look for an autorun.inf or table of contents or whatever is appropriate so that it can start playing, send back a disk icon, or activate incd or whatever is appropriate. (This exchange of notifications, but not data uses the outer two wires on the IDE cable. A damaged cable is often visible by the icon not changing when you change a disk long before you loose the drive access).
Again, this is not a completely technically correct explanation, but it is putting things in "laymans terms" so you can get the idea.

 

thanks for all that info. Does this mean that even though CR-R's are working ok, CD-RW's might not work due to the lens requiring a clean?