CD Writer Failing

I've not burnt any CDs for a few months but, having wanted to make one this week, I now have a new set of shiny drinks coasters! I'm using the latest CD Creator v5 (patched to latest 5.3.5 - no improvement), Win2k/SP3 and a Sony CRX185E1 writer (32x burn-proof).

When I write, EasyCD starts off at 32x but gradually gets down to 1x and then ejects the CD with a report of disk errors. I've tried two different lots of blanks and get the same. On one occasion, forcing the software to 8x write speed actually produced a good disk, but I can't repeat that.

I'm shutting down everything in the system tray and disabling Norton AV - doesn't make any difference. When I first installed this drive I could burn disks whilst working away on other work. Now zilch!

Anyone got any ideas why this should have happened?

 

Hi Steve

Mmmm, curly one.
Some things I would try:
Reseat the the connections of the drive and just check the jumper settings are correct.
Remove the drive in Device Manager and reboot for Windows to reinstall the drivers.
Check that your settings haven't changed in EasyCD or may need changing.
Uninstall/reinstall EasyCD.
Could the heads in the burner be dirty?
Try a trail program of another burner program.
Take your writing down to 1X or 2x and see if you can work out why this is happening. (I don't mind slow read/writes it gives better disks, but other may not have the patience).

Anyway hope this helps.

Matt

 

Matt,

Putting it down to its slowest speed in ECDC doesn't help (I managed one disk at 8x but that seems to be a one-off). Packet writing to CD-RW still works, so I don't think it's the hardware. I've also patched the roxio software to their latest v5 with no improvement.

I'm not going to pay to upgrade to v6 unless roxio can guarantee it will fix the problem. My best guess at the moment is that there's some conflict with a recent MS Win2k patch.

I still have the software that came with the drive but I don't want to rip out the roxio suite unless I have to. I can still burn essential CDs with my laptop so I can afford to wait a month or two to see if there's a fix or it goes away the same as it came!!

I'm hoping, of course, that somebody else recognises the problem and has an easy fix. I'm always loathe to did too deep to fix something that was working fine a few months ago.

Thanks for replying.
Steve