LITTLEBLACKDOG.COM

So a little back story, I have an HP DVD300i burner that I've had for a couple years. Has never burned a coaster the entire time I've owned it, and I've used 10 or 12 different kinds of media with no problems whatsoever, it only burns +R and +RW DVDs.

So my room mate's brother came up this weekend, and he wanted me to burn a few discs for him. So I take the first one, rip it with DVD Shrink like always, DVD Decrypter comes up to burn, I put in one of his blanks, a Ritek Ridata 4x disc, hit the burn button, and it gets about 10% in and fails. I thought that was odd, so I put in the discs I have been using thinking maybe my drive just doesn't like those particular ones. I bought a spindle of 100 Ritek Ridata 8x, I've burned to 80 of them with no problems. Again, 10% in and it fails.

So I bust out the room mate's laptop, he has a brand new Lite On external burner that he bought in January. I rip the movie on his comp, throw in one of his brother's Ritek blanks, it goes 10% in and fails. So I get one of the discs he's been using, a brand called Nexxtech, I've never heard of them, but they work. Throw that in and try again and it works just fine. So I'm back to the theory that our drives just didn't like those Ritek discs. Although it puzzles me that I had been using same brand with no probs, and then all of the sudden I get two coasters in a row. So we use the room mate's laptop to finish the remainder of the discs and I think nothing else about it.

Fast forward to today, I have a disc I need to copy. I throw it in, rip it, go to burn... and you guessed it... goes 10% and fails. It's giving write errors. So I go searching the interweb and everything I can find says that is media problems. But I'm not buying it, since I burned 80 successful discs on the same type of media with no probs. So I grab one of the room mate's nexxtech discs, fails. I had some memorex +RWs, they fail... I had the HP brand media that shipped with the drive... that fails. I have burned to all these types of media successfully before. So now I'm thinking that my drive is killing over. It will still playback DVDs, but won't burn any.

So I fire up Nero and burn a standard CD-R..... burns fine. So I take the .iso image that I ripped from my dvd earlier, mount it in daemon tools, set Nero for a disc to disc copy, and what do you know? It burns it without a hitch to my Ritek discs that I've been using all along.

So, it has to be a problem with DVD Decrypter... so I completely uninstall it, reboot, and reinstall it. Same problem. Anybody have any ideas what would make it do this?

Posted: Tue Feb 21, 2006 5:11 pm Post subject:

Could be a bad lot that they produced.

EEps · Posted: Tue Feb 21, 2006 7:57 pm Post subject:

What other software/codecs have you loaded/installed since the last time you didn't have problems? Blush Smile

Posted: Tue Feb 21, 2006 8:01 pm Post subject:

you didn't happen to check if its sony did you media did you?

Posted: Tue Feb 21, 2006 8:50 pm Post subject:

Nothing new installed or any changes made. I had just burned about 8 DVDs the day before and all was fine. I got the issue fixed, but I still don't know what caused it. In my search for the newest version of DVD Decrypter I ran across an article on afterdawn.org talking about how Macrovision had aquired the rights to the product and it was no longer being distributed. But the same guy who made the program released one called IMG Burn that looks exactly the same, except you cannot rip a disc with it, it only writes. So I downloaded that, and burned a DVD with it sucessfully. But there's no way to set DVD Shrink to automatically burn with it. So I downloaded DVD Decrypter again from a different source and reinstalled and it's burning normally now.

Posted: Fri Mar 24, 2006 1:02 pm Post subject:

Well, this problem came back on me a few days after I thought it was fixed. It is now burning about 5 coasters for every sucessful burn. Doesn't matter what program I'm using, Nero, DVD Decrypter, ImageBurn, all of them fail.

Last night I completely uninstalled the drive out of device manager, opened up the comp and replaced the IDE cable, reinstalled the drive, and reflashed the firmware to newest version (which it already had installed). After doing this I had a sucessful burn of a disc that had failed before the reinstall, so I thought it might be fixed, so I tried another to test and it failed with the same write errors.

I've switched media several times, using quality stuff that I know should work and that I had burned sucessfully on before and it's still failing more often than it's burning.

So what do ya think, is there anything else left to try? Or should I resign myself to the fact that the drive is gonna die and replace it?

EEps · Posted: Fri Mar 24, 2006 1:20 pm Post subject:

Send the drive back... Wink Smile

Posted: Fri Mar 24, 2006 1:26 pm Post subject:

BamZipPow wrote:
Send the drive back...

Well, it's 3 years old, bit late for that... I could probably buy a new one for what it would cost to repair. Plus I think it was a refurb to begin with. I bought it from eCost.com.

Posted: Fri Mar 24, 2006 1:59 pm Post subject:

As a followup to this, if I do end up having to replace the drive what would you guys go for? I'm looking at Lite-On and Plextor DVD + and - RW drives with dual layer support at the moment.

EEps · Posted: Fri Mar 24, 2006 2:24 pm Post subject:

DVD-RAM

no DVD-RAM Sad Smile

DVD-RAM with Lightscribe... Wink Smile

Posted: Mon Mar 27, 2006 6:46 am Post subject:

DVD/CD burners are all about the same. Get whichever one has the features, interface type and pricepoint that you want. Plextor and LiteOn are both reputable brands.

Posted: Mon Mar 27, 2006 7:01 am Post subject:

GibsonSG wrote:
As a followup to this, if I do end up having to replace the drive what would you guys go for? I'm looking at Lite-On and Plextor DVD + and - RW drives with dual layer support at the moment.

I've got two LG GSA-4163B burners and one LG GSA-4167B. They support +/- R/RW and RAM, and dual-layer. They burn up to 16x, if the media supports it, and they've never given me any grief. About the only thing they don't do is LightScribe, which is fine by me anyway.

Leg Humper Joined: 01 Jun 2004 Posts: 4702 Location: Utah

You might try opening up the drive and cleaning off the lens(es) with some alcohol and one of those ear cleaner thingies... Just be careful not to leave any residue on the lense ! Shocking Smile

Posted: Tue Apr 11, 2006 3:05 pm Post subject:

also may wanna run your system's memory through a tester program. I had a stick go bad on me and started making bad burns on my NEC drive... replaced the RAM and back to normal

but if it's 3 years old and you've used it a lot... the laser may be wearing out

or it just needs a good cleaning (like was already stated)

Posted: Wed Apr 12, 2006 3:43 pm Post subject:

Well, I think I finally have this fixed... but I still don't know the why or how of it. Ever since I got the drive I had it configured thusly:

Primary IDE to C: drive as master, slaved to CD-ROM Drive
Secondary IDE to DVD burner as master

It worked fine that way for 3 years. Last weekend I started getting low on HD space so I opened'er up and put in a 40 gig drive I had laying around. At that time I reconfigured thusly:

Primary IDE to C: drive as master, slaved to 2nd HD
Secondary IDE to DVD burner as master, slaved to CD-ROM drive.

I didn't change the IDE cable, or even reseat it, but since doing that I've burned 10 discs in a row with no coasters. CD-ROM drive is working fine, and both hard drives are operating flawlessly... so I don't think it was IDE controller going bad or anything of that nature. I'm stumped.

BamZipPow wrote:

GibsonSG wrote:

Lycander wrote: