Pioneer 106D stopped recognizing discs previously burned

[vladimir]

My Pioneer 106D successfully worked for 9 months, but at some point stopped recognizing about 80% of DVDR discs that i prviously burned on it.

That is - after I insert the disc, the indicator is on for 7-10 seconds, then it goes off, and in Windows explorer the label "DVD-RW Drive" changes to "CD Drive". When I attempt to read the disc in Explorer, I get the message ""Please insert a disk into drive G:". Other programs (incl. DOS ones) do not recognize the disc as well. The unreadable discs also fail to eject after first pressure of the button.

However, it reads some of my discs. I use only Nero (recently upgraded to 6.3.1.20) and only Verbatim discs.

The problem appeared abruptly, maybe (I am not 100% sure) after I flashed the drive with 1.08 firmware.

I tried to switch the drive to master/slave position and to primary/secondary IDE channel with no results.

I did not yet test the readability of discs on the other drive.

However, do you think it's some hardware problem that I will finally solve by replacing the drive?

[Capmaster]

Did you try reflashing with the OEM firmware?

Did you try cleaning the laser lens yet? ($10 cleaner disc at Walmart)

[vladimir]

Did you try reflashing with the OEM firmware?

Yes. The problem began somewhere about the tim I flashed the most recent 1.08 firmware from Pioneer

Did you try cleaning the laser lens yet? ($10 cleaner disc at Walmart)

Not yet. I'll try that

[deckard8]

Try the discs in another computer dvd drive. I had same problem, it turned out to be the totally useless Swisstec DVD-r discs. My backups gradually faded away after about 3 months!

[vladimir]

Tried cleaning. No results.

[vladimir]

With the help of shamanism I managed to read most of the discs which I previously marked as "unreadable". In appeared that after 5-10 attempts the drive finally recognized each disc, and after recognizing it successfully read it without any errors.

However, in the majority of attempts the drive, after some thinking, pretended that it had no disk inside at all.

So my media is ok (will yet try them in another drive tomorrow), what's with my drive?

[vladimir]

I tried the discs in another drive - all were read without errors.

As far as I managed to save all the information I am worrying only about preventing a similar situation in future.

Particularly, I paid attention to the message that DVDInfopro displays when I load the "uneadable" (or "hardly readable") disc: "Drive did not report Ready". It differs from the usual "No Media is present" message given when there's no disc inside. However, the behaviour of Windows Explorer and most other programs looks like there is no disc at all.
"Drive did not report Ready" looks like a timeout message.

Is anyone aware of any low-level means that would allow me to further diagnose the issue? E. g. the same program DVDInfopro allows to send a "Custom command" to the drive.