Ostriig on 10/1/2011 at 20:12

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Went on holiday and I burned myself a few DVDs to bring back, problem is that my desktop's DVD unit won't read the bloody things. It spins them up, takes two eternities with that progress bar in the location field in explorer trying to recognise the disc, then doesn't. If I try to access it it tells me that there's no disc in the unit and ejects the tray.

The discs are Traxdata 8.5GB DVD +R DL, they were written as disc-at-once, so there should be no multisession bullshit. They were written with a (http://www.sony-optiarc.us/en/products/slim-line-drives/bd-5730s) Sony Optiarc BD-5730s (which of course reads them back), the drive in the desktop which refuses to read them is listed as a (http://www.sony-optiarc.eu/products/archive/dvddrivesdesktoppcs/ad7170a.html) Sony Optiarc AD-7170a in the Device Manager. It doesn't list compatibility with DVD +R DL per se, but it does DVD+R9, which I understand is the same thing. The drive is three years old, going on four, I've just used a leans cleaner disc on it but to no effect. I've also tested the discs with another unit, an HL-ST-something-somewhat in my old Acer Extensa, and they work just fine.

The only difference I can see is that the Optiarc that wrote them as well as the HL are both set to No Region, whereas the drive in the desktop is set to region 2. But these are data discs, not video ones, surely it doesn't make any difference? So anyone know what's going on, is it finally going screwy after all this time?

lost_soul on 10/1/2011 at 21:14

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It happens. I had two PCs and one Ubuntu CD. The disk would work flawlessly in one CD-drive, but generate tuns of I/O errors in the other and crash. I even took the offending CD, burned it to another CD-R from another brand and it worked in the picky drive!

I do not recommend those lens cleaner disks because in my experience, they only made problems worse. I did open a Playstation 2 that my buddy gave me once and I cleaned the lens with alcohol. He gave it to me because it wouldn't load PS2 games anymore. It has worked flawlessly ever since.