Dead DVD Burner?

[hawk]

I have an NEC ND-1300A DVD Writer. In the middle of burning a movie with TMPGE DVD Author an error "enexpected result" appeared. Since then I get a message that says that the writer is not ready. When DVD's are put in the burner light burns for a few seconds and quits. No files on a DVD disc appear in explorer. In Device Manager it says that everything is working properly. It will however play CD's. I have run DVD info and everything appears normal. I have removed the driver and let it reinstall. My next step is to move it to another machine and see if it will do anything. Does anyone out there have any suggestions? Unfortunately this is an OEM burner that is 90 days old and the place where I bought it will not respond to my e-mails and say on their website that they only cover the burners for 30 days and after that they must be returned to the manufacturer. Of course NEC says that all OEM burners must be returned to the seller.

Thanks for any help that anyone can offer, and sorry if I have posted to the wrong forum. I visit the site often but this is my first post here.


Dell 4100
Windows XP Home
1 GHz Intel CPU
Planar Motherboard
512 Mb Ram
ATI All In Wonder 9000 64 Mb
Sound Blaster Audigy
NEC 5700 CD
NEC 1300a DVD-RW
30 GB Western Digital
100 GB Western Digital
Primary Use: Home Theatre

[jbenj01]

You said you've uninstalled driver.. have you tried uninstalling the NEC itself from Device Manager, then rebooting to let it re-install?

[hawk]

No, but I will give that a try.

[mackgee]

I would suggest trying a different burning application as well, try to narrow down all the possibilities before sending it anywhere..

[jtoolman2000]

Same thing with my nec nd 1300a except it is a usb2 external. Last night it worked, making to perfect backups at 4x of ritek GO4s. Today it does not. All inidicators saw it is OK. Device manager does not report a problem with it. I tried to run system restore to rool back to a time when it was working. No dice. I uninstalled and reinstalled drivers, during installation and subsequent boot up, it detected the drive w/o a problem. Still no dice. Today I took it to my work place and installed it on my new gateway 6000 P$ 2800 Mhz machine ( At home I have a two year old gateway 500 series - P4 2400 mhz - 512 DDR ram - dual 120 mb drives and one external 120) and it will play and write to cd but will not read or write to dvd. I worked perfectly since new, burning over 500 disks with it.
I am perplexed. Could these drive just up and die just like that? It's curious that in both hawk's example and in mine, both will only writeand read to cd.
[/quote]

[hawk]

I have tried completely removing the drive and then plugging it back in and letting it install and that didn't help. I moved it to my other computer (3 GHz Dell XPS) and it would not work there either. I contacted tech support at the place where I bought it (AVLogic) by phone and they told me to send it to them to let them have a look at it. It will be a day or 2 before I can get it shipped, so if someone has any ideas about what the problem might be other than the drive dying please post.

I read that there are actually 2 lasers in a dvd writer, one for the cd and one for the dvd. I don't know how accurate that is, but if that is correct that could explain why it works a little on the cd part and not the dvd.

Also, I have noticed that it doesn't spin up to high speed even when a cd disc is inserted either. Sounds like major failure to me. I'll keep following the posts and report back on the eventual resolution.

[ampex]

Try Stomp's RecordNow Max 4.50, if you can find it. I also have the NEC 1300A, and I flashed it with firmware so many times that Nero won't write to it. It goes for a couple seconds, then quits, much like yours does. But, RecordNow Max 4.50 burns perfectly.

ampex

[RabidDog]

and I flashed it with firmware so many times that Nero won't write to it.

That shouldnt be anything to do with it.. virtually infinite amount of flashes before eeprom "wears" out.

[ampex]

and I flashed it with firmware so many times that Nero won't write to it.

That shouldnt be anything to do with it.. virtually infinite amount of flashes before eeprom "wears" out.

No.. there's always a risk when you flash of damaging the hardware.. thats why they all come with warnings..

[fatboylouie]

I'm having this exact same problem with the pioneer dvr-a06

From the My computer screen, i can still do things like "Eject" but when i put a disc in, it just doesn't read. Argh!

I don't know what to do!

[yoda21000]

from what website did you buy this from?

[hawk]

I wanted to update everyone on the status of my original post. I ended up returning my NEC 1300a to AVLogic where I purchased it. They checked it and sent it to NEC for replacement. All indications are that the DVD writer laser died. The replacement drive has worked flawlessly for about 2 weeks now. There was about a 4 week turn around time because AVLogic did not have any more of the 1300a's in stock. Thanks again for all the response to my problem.

[snafu099]

My oem 1300a has also become half dead, but in my case it is the cd part.
Will not read or write cd

Burn't very few cd's with it but over 300 dvd -r
Would have expected the dvd portion to go, not the cd

Loved the drive up till now

[RDS1955]

Maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree, but I used to get errors with my TDK dvd reader and Lite On DVD-RAM unit sometime ago... one day it worked, the next day they wouldn't do a thing..This went on for about a week and a half.... I did some serious searching throughout various help sites and googles links... one of the most prevalent fixes that kept popping up was to update and reinstall the most up-to-date windows media player and codecs.. in my case windows media player 9... I took a chance and followed the suggestions... AND VIOLA!!!! it actually worked.....I have no idea why this worked..... But it did for me.... Just Food for thought.... don't know if it'll help or not, but if all else fails, in my case it was worth a try before trashing the non working units and replacing them...

[dxj40c]

Couldn't tell on your profile what os you are using. I had trouble with an NEC burner using Win2K, but when I changed to XP it worked fine.

My problem was not exactly the same. Sometimes the drive would not show up under 'My Computer'. When it did show up, sometimes it would disappear in process of burning and the burn would stop mid-disk. I had given up on it. One day I decided to go to XP and, presto, it started working again and has for a year now.

That might indicate a windows driver problem??? Good luck.