Help : My cd -rw wont accept that thers a disc in it

[Bumpydog]

Hi, this is my second post here. The whole place looks very high tech at this time so I am taking it slowly to digest it all.

Can someone plz advise where I could go to get this problem sorted out.

My Cd-rw (Philips 4x8x32 model No cdd 4801/65). It says it a IDE.
I have checked & tripple checked it out.
The whole setup says it is working fine. I can open & close it remotely, Ie through a program media player prassi pro dvd. But whatever I put in it the drive wont accept that there is a disc there, it wont read anything or play or record. I have removed it cleaned it removed it by the remove of the drivers and updated the drivers, which are M/soft drivers.
It was burning very well before but then started only burning up to 25% then closing and it was intermitent, but was working agin when I re started the comp

I am very stuck and I have been at this for sveral days, So I have been trying everything before I asked for help or redirection.


Regards




Bumpydog

[Roundabout]

This sounds like a weak laser, since you said it was working properly before. It could be just dust on the lens (depends on age of unit, if it has a dust seal, how often it's opened, other environmental factors) or it could be the laser itself is defective. I've had it happen to me with a Samsung CD/RW that I hardly used, maybe a total of 25 hours or so - it finally got to the point where it would hardly burn a cd at all. The CD's it did manage to make were almost unplayable in a normal CD player. The discs would skip, get static or stop playing altogther. I finally just replaced it with a new one (not a Samsung) with 52x/24x/52x and haven't had any more problems. I had cleaned the laser in the Samsung, but I kinda knew it wouldn't work, because the unit was almost new and I knew there couldn't be much, if any, dust on the lens.
In your case, it could just be a matter of dust/smoke/smog. If you really want to try, you can open it up and gently clean the laser lens with a dry q-tip (one soaked in alcohol could damage the laser assy, or smear smog residue around on the lens without removing it) and just wipe it gently with both ends of the q-tip to remove any dust. All it takes is a thin layer of dust (or smog from the environment) to cloud the lens and stop it from reading reliably. If more people knew this, they wouldn't be so fast to take their CD players/writers in for repair. Of course, it's possible the laser itself has gone south, but this is one way to check it out. If the unit is old (4x8x32 is not very new, for sure) you may want to pick up a new one - I got mine for 9.99 after rebate from Office Max. Hardly worth messing with an old one, when newer/faster ones are so cheap now.
Well, it's not a guaranteed fix, but it's certainly worth a try, if you are handy at all and know what the laser pickup assy. looks like. Give it a try and see what happens.