Sony DW-Q28A can't read DVD+R written on itself

[mackayr]

I have a strange problem. Intermittently (more often than not) my Sony DW-Q28A (apparently it's the same as the Sony DRU-800A) can't read DVD+R's written with itself. Data disks are ok, it's only when I burn a DVD movie. Oddly the movie can be watched fine on my set-top, so I know it's not corrupt. When I load the DVD in my drive, it comes up as empty and prompts me for a name.

Any idea why this would be happening? I updated my firmware to latest version to no avail.

Thanks,

Rob

[redwudz]

No, I don't know why it happens, but it's not uncommon for burners to not to be able to read the discs they created. There are quite a few posts that state the same problem. There doesn't seem to be much of a common cause.

I don't have a explanation.

One thing you might try is to uninstall the IDE channel the burner is on. That may not cure the problem, but it will force Windows to reset the drive and it might help. It shouldn't cause any problems otherwise.

Control Panel>System>Hardware>Device Manager>IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers. Select the IDE channel the drive is on, then select 'Uninstall', then reboot the computer. That will reinstall the channel.

Other than that, if there are no other problems with the drive, or no one comes up with a cure, don't try playback with the drive. I realize that's not a great option.

I do have a Sony DW-Q28A. but I haven't had that particular problem.

And welcome to our forums.

[bevills1]

I've seen quite a few CDFreaks posts for NEC drives having such problems with burned -R discs in particular. In 1 interesting thread I saw a post stating those same discs could be read in Win98 and Vista but not in XP. I have same -R issues with a NEC 3520 which don't read in Win2K (except in safe mode) and do read in Win98. FYI safe mode is unacceptable due to not all drivers loaded, and it is painfully slow when I tried it just to experiment. The only solutions I find is to use different media, get another burner or another OS.

[oldandinthe way]

New burner is probably the cheapest in the longterm.