Having a problem with dvd burners

I had a sony for over a year and it worked great until about a month ago. It all the sudden stopped reading dvd's and burning them properly. Well I thought maybe it just got old and burned out or something so I bought a new one.

I bought a Liteon 20x dvd writer from wal-mart and installed it. Well problem solved, or so I thought. Turned out it was solved for 2 weeks. Now it is doing the same thing my last drive did. It won't read discs and is failing to burn properly. I put in a regular dvd movie to try and watch it and it doesn't work. I put in the first installation disk for world of warcraft and the drive recognizes the disk but it won't run it. When I try to burn something it goes very, very slow and doesn't turn out right in the end. I have been making a lot of my own dvd's using nero 7. About 23 of them to be exact. All within the two weeks that I have had the new liteon drive.

Is it possible that I overused it and burnt it out? Or could something else be causing it to malfunction? Any help with this would be great. I'm really afraid if I take this drive back and get a new one that I am going to run into the same problem a couple weeks from now and I really don't want that.

 

The only external thing i can think of is to replace the ide cable from the motherboard to the drive, its possible you have bad drives. ed

 

Would the ide cable cause the drives to go bad on me though? If the cable was bad, the new drive I bought wouldn't have worked for 2 weeks before it quit would it?

I returned the Liteon drive and exchanged it for a sony that I just installed and so far it's working fine. Should I be worried that in a couple weeks it may go out on me?

 

Some times just moving the cable will bring it back to life, very possible the drives were bad. If this happens again unplug the cable and put back on the pins, and see if moving the cable around will change anything. ed

 

alright thanks for the advice, I'll do that if I have the problem again

 

I think I might be having this very same problem -- both of my DVD drives are malfunctioning and I have no idea what's going on. I have to reboot each time for the computer to recognize them and just now they have stopped burning CDs/DVDs.

Can you tell me how to move or replace this cable? Do I have to open up the back of the computer?

 

ok so I have a problem, the sony drive will not read normal dvd movies... I put them in and the green light just flashes slowly and my computer freezes until I eject the disc. any idea why this is happening? also when I have the my computer screen up, where it shows my dvd drive... well when I put in a dvd movie it changes to just saying cd drive.

 

put in a new ide cable and it's still doing the same thing... also it wont read any discs now, cd or dvd... just freezes up the computer. was probably like that before replacing the ide cable but I never checked a regular cd until now so idk.

 

can anybody help?

 

could the old ide cable have ruined the drives and now that I have a new ide cable installed I simply need to replace the drive?

 

Seems like there is a lot of bad drives here latley, Im on my third LG 20x from Sams club, does exactly what you are saying, junk drives. ed

 

DITTO i have am having exactly all the same problems and can't believe that both my dvds are faulty when it happened simultaneously, if I work it out I will post here.
changing cable etc did not fix.

SETUP is sony DVD burner (sec master) and an aopen dvd rom ( sec slave).
they are connected as cable select on my second ide conection.

Having just typed this I realised I might try setting them as master and slave and see what that does. I will post result.....

 

edit sorry doubled up on my reply

DITTO i have am having exactly......

 

A generic diagnostic, check your DMA status on the drives. DMA has to be enabled to work correctly.