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DVD drives Don't Read CDs

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by bolinas road creative

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I've got a computer I built a few years back: ASUS motherboard, P4, 2 gigs of RAM, couple of SATA hard drives, a Samsung DVD-ROM SD-616 and an NEC DVD-RW 3540A. During the computer's life I upgraded from XP to Vista (no flames please) but my problems were not coincident with the upgrade.

Here's what happened: first the NEC DVD-RW drive stopped reading and writing CDs. It would still read and burn DVDs. I tried reinstalling the drivers, but that didn't do anything. I lived with it. Okay, I'm a procrastinator. Then about nine months later the other drive the Samsung stopped reading CDs. It, too, has no problem with DVDs.

Is this just coincidental? Did these drives just go bad in the same way? Is there something I screwed up when I built the computer? It worked just fine for many months.

Thanks for any thoughts or suggestions.

4 replies

by oh smeg

is all that has gone wrong. It is possible to burn out Optical Drives with a substandard Power Supply but there are always other problems present.

But if you leave disc's in the different drives they can break quite quickly.

At a guess what has happened here is that the LED that generates the Laser Beams which has different colours for different Media as the CD is different to the DVD has burnt out on one of the 2 colours and as a result in no longer able to read the Disc's that the Colour reads.

Replacing the drives is the answer here and after they are replaced don't leave disc's in them until they are required. If you need a certain Disc a lot of the time get a copy of Virtual CD and copy the CD onto a HDD to use.

Defiantly No Flames here about Vista all IT Pros need the [b]Paying Domestic Beta Testers[/b] to work out & find all the numerous Bugs that come with any new OS so that when this is deployed we know what to look for and how to fix it.

Col

by bolinas road creative

Sounds like you nailed it. The drives have had a ton of use, and I imagine I've left discs in the drives on a regular basis, too. I'll swap out the DVDs and see if that solves it.

Thanks for the details.

by oh smeg

It always helps if you understand how something works so you know how to look after it.

Col

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