DVD drive being a s.o.b!

hello everyone, once again.

ok, i have burning home movies and stuff for about 4 or 5 months. Now, all the sudden, my dvd drive is on the fritz. i took it out of my cpu, cleaned it and stuff, hoping it would work. and it did. for a half an hour. sometimes it will read a dvd disc, sometimes it wont. it NEVER reads a blank dvd though. i tried burning with dvd decypter and nero buring rom. my dvd is a sony dru710a, i have updated the firmware from by02 to byx4, hoping that would help, but it didnt. i have a gig of pc3200 ram; pent 4 3.2; xp home sp2. the media i am using is memorex 8x dvd+r, which is the same brand i have been with for the past 4 months or so. i have ran multiple anti virus/spyware stuff (spybot, hijakcthis, cwshredder, ms antispy, adaware) to see if taht is the problem, and it shouldnt be.


also, on another note, how do i tell the difference between an agp slot and a pci express slot? i thought i heard agp was always long and brown, but my video card (radeon 9800 pro 128mb) is in a short green slot, inserted a little bit further in my machine than the other open slots.

 

hmmm. a spare ide cable huh? never thought of that. i will look to see if i have an extra one somewhere, should have. i was also wondering if (i have 2 cd-dvd drives, a cd rw and the sony) i should switch the dvd burner from being the slave drive to being the master drive. i dont know what kinda impact that will have on it, but it's worth a shot. i think the drive might just be messed up, but i have no idea why. should i purchase and run one of those cd cleaner things through it?

thanks for that link halo, cleared up some questions.

 

naw, warrenty is no good. drive is about 8 months old, got it for christmas. i will try that ide thing, and let you know. i have gotten about 100-125 burns from it, so i dont know if that is a good life or not.

 

well, i suppose that it is he burner. it's werid. i reformatted my hd, and everything was working good. it reads anything disc now, except blank ones. doesnt read those. i think it is just time for a new burner. halo, i also tried the new ide caable, with no avail.

 

oh yeah, it's worth a try!