CD-RW Drive Problem - Not Working

I am currently having a problem with my CD-RW drive on my Gateway Laptop and am wondering if anyone else has experienced the same problem or can give me some insight on how to fix it.

I don’t use my CD-RW drive to burn CDs on a routine basis so I’m not sure when exactly the problem started, but upon recently burning a few I noticed that the last couple of tracks would start to skip when I would playback the CD after the burning was completed. I tried some logical troubleshooting: trying different cd burning media programs, different CD-R discs, and even not loading up the cd to full capacity with songs, but nothing seemed to remedy the situation. No matter what I tried or how many songs I put on the CD, the last couple songs would skip. I am assuming since my primitive troubleshooting didn’t fix the burning problem, that my CD-RW drive has somehow gone bad. What I can’t understand is why it only is affecting the last couple songs on the CD instead of every song?

I don’t know if it matters or not, but I recently dumped everything on my laptop and started from scratch, reloading everything from Windows XP on up due to a virus that I couldn’t get rid of for quite some time that finally got under my skin. Am I missing a driver or something that I need, maybe something was deleted when I dumped my hard drive and I need an upgrade or something versus getting a whole new CD-RW drive?

Please help, any and all suggestions are welcome. I have a better than basic knowledge of computers but this is stumping me.

By the way, my CD-RW drive is a QSI CDRW/DVD SBW-241, in case it means anything to anyone.

Thanks,
John

 

Interesting problem you have here. Here is my hypohisis (here we go....)

The CD-RW drive in your laptop has gone bad. And why it is skipping the last few tracks is because the motor may be malfunctioning. Every CD writing program has to "close" the CD in order to have it available to listen on a CD player. This basically means the program writes a few lines of code to the CD where the data stops to tell the player "yep, all the data is done and there is no data past this point". If you have ever listened to any CDRW write the "close" on an audio CD, you will hear that it spins up and spins down the CD a few times (depending on the model of CDRW) and your motor in your drive might not be able to keep up, possibly writing some of that "close" code over the last track or 2, causing it to skip. My solution might be to try burning at slower speeds and if that does not do the trick, bite the bullet and buy a new one from Gateway (or a new USB or firewire external drive if Gateway tries to screw you, which they might)

Good luck!

 

Try having it write at a lower speed (as the previous post suggests), and also have it test and write, not just write. You might also try having it write everything to the HD and burn all at once, instead of track-by track.