StarDestroyer.Net BBS

The title says it all really. Any help by those more knowledgable would be extremely helpful. The read light is always on and though it will still eject and sounds like it tries to read what you put in there it reports nothing is ever in the drive. It sometimes it says there's an I/O error. It seems that it stopped working after a housemate put a music CD in it to rip if that helps any.

I've tried uninstalling the device, the drivers, reinstalling updating and every kind of fix I can think of.

Many thanks to anyone with advice.

Is it a removable drive? I find that ejecting the entire drive and re-inserting it helps for mine when it acts up.

It's not easily removable. I can't even get the damned case open to look at it, there's something in there holding it closed and it's no screw I can find on the outside.

What kind of laptop is it?
A lot of newer ones make it easy to replace the CD/DVD drive, as all you do is remove one screw from the bottom of the machine, and it pops rigbt out without dismantling the computer.
In fact, if it is the drive itself and it is easily removable, I have a spare laptop Sony CDRW/DVD ROM combo drive (I upgraded to an NEC DVD/RW drive) that I'll let you have for $30 shipped if you live in the continental US.

If you want a DVD burner, you can get an NEC from newegg for about $80 or so.

It's an Acer 2010, the drive is a Mashita DVD-RAM UJ-820S. The last place I asked for a quote on a replacement told me ~$600 for a new drive which is just ridiculous since I only paid $1000 for the thing in the first place.

Thanks for the offer Glocksman but I'm Australian unfortunately. Much appreciated though.

If it costs that much to replace and you can't get it working you are better of getting an external USB drive and just using that instead.

Its possible that some sort of crap got put in there along with the CD and is now blocking proper function. If the drive is out of warranty I'd open it up and see what the situation is inside. If you don't feel confortable doing that you should at least buy one of those cleaner CDs and use it. They work very well for small objects causing trouble.

It sounds to me like this sort of problem.

Anyway, better to test a bit then throw money away, especialy if it is a difficult to replace internal laptop drive.

I am having a similar problem, except my DVD drive will read only dvd videos but will not read discs that I have burned data on.

Kojiro, just do what glocksman said. Then buy a new drive and install it yourself. Laptop DVD drives are not $600.

Extensive probing has revealed that the ASPI drivers aren't installed correctly. I suspect something went wrong when iTunes and Nero were uninstalled by my housemate to put that cursed spawn of evil, World of Warcraft on the machine.

What perplexes me now though is that even though I've identified the problem, and tried several method to reinstall the ASPI layers, they won't install.

My sister has a duplicate laptop. I'm going to back my stuff up on the main machine and then do a hard drive swap and reinstall using her machine, unless anyone can see this as bad idea.

Kojiro wrote:Extensive probing has revealed that the ASPI drivers aren't installed correctly. I suspect something went wrong when iTunes and Nero were uninstalled by my housemate to put that cursed spawn of evil, World of Warcraft on the machine.

What perplexes me now though is that even though I've identified the problem, and tried several method to reinstall the ASPI layers, they won't install.

My sister has a duplicate laptop. I'm going to back my stuff up on the main machine and then do a hard drive swap and reinstall using her machine, unless anyone can see this as bad idea.

Didn't it come with recovery CD's?
Using them would be easier than a HD swap.

If it is windows there should be a roll back option for your drivers. Have you tried that?

I've tried the rollback.

Glocksman: It does have the recovery CDs but the the issue is with the CD drive.

Have you tried system restore? With a large hard drive it should have quite a few points to go back to. Unless your problems are months old you should be able to find a restore point before the problems started.

Kojiro wrote:Glocksman: It does have the recovery CDs but the the issue is with the CD drive.

Hehehe, that would be a problem. Talk about a catch-22.

Kojiro wrote:I've tried the rollback.

Glocksman: It does have the recovery CDs but the the issue is with the CD drive.

If the drive itself is defective, then of course the recovery discs are useless.
But if the issue is malware in windows fucking with the CD drive, then booting directly from the recovery discs and and running a full reinstall that blanks the HD should fix the problem.