HP 800 series CDRW is now PICKY!

[Kuasimodem]

My brother bought this drive a couple years ago, and it was working fine up until about 3 weeks ago. Now, unless you use a black, red, purple, blue, or pink colored CDR disks, it will lock up at the same sector, give a write error, and lock up the CD drives and the CD activity and burn lights stay lit. After getting this error, the only way to get it to release the disk and reset is to do a hard reboot.

I'm beginning to think that the laser element is getting weak in this thing, and it can't burn on silver disks because of this.

We've tried all the tips from the HP site and what I could find with google online, including:

• opening the drive and cleaning all dust and crud out of it
• changing the jumper to cable select
• changing out IDE cable for a know good one, in both 40 and 80 wire flavors
• firmware update on the burner
• moving the other CD drive to another IDE cable so the CDRW has its own cable
• trying different burning programs (Adaptec, Nero, CloneCD, Burn N Go, NTI)

We're about to make the drive part of our 4th of July fireworks show and get a LiteOn 40x burner from NewEgg to replace it.

[bigblue77]

Sounds to me like the drive is toast. You have tried everything I can think of. Guess its time for a new one.

Jer

[Richard Cranium]

Defrag ?

[Kuasimodem]

He defrags on a weekly basis, I trained him well. He also updates his Norton Antivirus at least once a week too

I'm thinking that bigblue77 is right, the drive is on it's last legs