DVD DRIVE BURNED OUT?

[Artful Dodger]

Hello all- my trouble starts with my dvd-r drive in my emac. It just started to have spots (pause/freeze) in my backups. They were Van Helsing, Return of the Jedi, Jimmy Neutron and some movie clips from videos I shot of Niagara Falls. I have used Toast and imovie/idvd to burn my stuff.
My media I use are TDK, VERBATIM, PIODATA. Also used RWs on all of these that I could and went to 1x speed but still have the problems no matter what I try. Also i use MTR and DVD2one. One last thing I tried to due full movie and movie only with the first 3 above.Thanks for any help.

[g4cube]

How old is the drive and what make/model is it? Has it been moded in anyway? Have you used it alot? All these questions will help with your problem mate the more we know the more we can tell you.

[Artful Dodger]

Hi, my emac is about 18 mths old and I do have apple care for futher help. the drive model is a HL-DT-ST GCA-4020B and has not been moded. I have made about 280 dvds and other than my first steps into making dvds of any type I can say about 5 were bad due to media and trial.
My emac is a 800 g4 and has 1 gig of memory. Also it did this with a small file size (900mb) of Niagara Falls, to much for a cd so I put it on a dvd-rw with toast (5.2.3). Also using Panther 10.3.5.
So just for the sake of trial and error I made that file smaller and burned it in iMovie, only to make a coaster-bad skips and freezes.
Called Apple and tried Disk Warrior as they said it maybe an option if nothing else seems to work. Okay lol it can burn my music cds fine since this started but no dvds. I hope this helps out more--peace Scott

[thoughton]

It's possible your DVD laser might be on its last legs They have a limited life, you cant make an exact prediction but for a CD laser it's a few hundred burns. I "used up" the CD laser in my last powerbook combo drive after about 300 burns. DVDs worked, but it was unable to mount any CD.

Give diskwarrior a try by all means, but if I was you I wouldn't waste too much time or money trying to fix it. Internal DVD-R drives for desktops are dirt cheap, and only take 5 minutes to install.

[Artful Dodger]

Thanks thoughton for the reply. It's good to know about that number of disks it may act up /burn out. I used diskwarrior and everything seems fine now. I was able to make 4 movies and a few music cds yesterday but will keep an eye on it. Still have 18mths left on my apple care so I'm not to upset just happy it is working. Thanks again.