DVD writer exchange for my Pioneer DVR-530H

[J.J.F]

[b] DVD writer troubles

Hi, my name is Jacques and I'm new to this forum and furthermore, English is only my third language, so I do my very best to make myself understandable in order to get some feedback. For those of you who might feel the need to correct my English command error's, please be invited. I would appreciate it al lot. Thanks.

About a week or so ago, I bought a DVD Recorder on, you'll never guess, the internet. Somebody offered his for sale, and yeah, I can hear you thinking : stupid. Well, maybe so. Nevertheless, as long as I record and playback to & from the harddisk, everything works just fine. From the minute I change to play/record mode from the DVD-writer all the mess start's immediately. The slide to put in the blank/registered DVD open's and close's and for some reason doesn't stop doing so, open/close open /close and so on. Unfortunately a total lock-up is the result, even the on/standby switch is out of order. The only way to get out of this slide opening/closing procedure is to simply pull out the mains cord. I admit, I would prefer it a little bit easier, more the natural kind of thing.

So I did study electronic's some ages ago, I lot before DVD even existed. So naturaly I thought - again my error - that I could fix this rather simply. Forget it. Although, the HD is a Seagate 160 Gb IDE, wich some day I might want to upgrade to let's say 400 Gb or something like that. The DVD hardware is a DVR-RO9 and, oeps, no IDE. If just that could have been that easy. Forget about that too.

Furthermore I've seen that some of you were talking about a Service DVD, where can I get one or would somebody be so nice to make a copy all expenses paid for, of course.

My question : Is the DVD hardware broken because I've already tried the hard-recover initialisation procedure (hold the Stand-by and stop buttons simultaniously until the machine is switching off. And then start and going to the intialisation procedure (language, country, date, time), the usual stuff. So far, so good, but the slide is still going open/close/open/close and so on.

Did anybody experienced the same malfunction and what can I do about it ? Changing to new hardware, and if so, where can it be found since, like I said, It isn't the usual DVD writer hardware due to the lack of the IDE socket.

Can anybody please try to help ? Kind regards and thank you very, very much,

J.J.F (Belgium)

[aedipuss]

it was probably broken by the previous owner as you suspect. it's more likely the drive controller board and not the drive itself.

but, since you seem to be fairly handy there isn't any reason not to try to fix it though. i'd take it apart again and carefully remove the dvd drive. inspect it and see if something is preventing the tray from fully closing - any small object in the slider tray. turn it over and give it a light shake. then reinstall it making sure the flat cables are inserted fully and the proper side is touching the contacts. with the cover still open plug it in and operate the drive. watch and see if something blocks it from closing. if it's still not working you get a disc in the tray by turning it off when the tray is open, download a firmware update and see if the drive will read it.

about all i can think of.