by Ricyn on Sat Apr 05, 2003 8:53 am
Hi. I have a LG GCC-4120B 12/8/32/8 CD-RW/DVD-ROM . It's burned well through close to a thousand burns, a variety of medias (I'm using Verbatims at the moment), and all kinds of workload. However, yesterday, as I was getting ready to burn off another 20 cds off the ole 80 gig western dig SE (no, I'm not bragging, I'm explaining everything I have), the first one went fine.
After that, the burner had an error approximately 30 seconds into burning that seemed related to buffer underrun, as it would stop burning and attempt to regain its position, only to find it "unaddressable". Unhappy at my coaster, I moved onto the next cd I was supposed to burn, only to have the same thing happen. Thinking that windows was bloated out on me, I gave it a reboot and a defrag, only to have it happen yet again (with a 3rd compiliation). So I pulled the drive apart (warranty? bah, expired) to find that requests to burn/erase rw media don't even cause the disc to spin up. The drive seems to read discs ok (I haven't pulled out a dvd to check if it still reads those), but writing seems to be a lost cause.
So my question is simple: Is my drive borked? If so, I've played the tech support game for this kind of thing before, and while you generally get a new drive it takes forever, so I'd probably forego that and go for a new combo drive (I plan on adding the dvd burner later and being able to copy burned DVDs will be important). I've seen decent reviews of Plexies, Samsungs, and the newer LG combo drives, so what suggestions do you guys have on which one I should get? Of my importance I rate burning quality first, then burning speed, then read speed, then dvd read speed.
Thank you for your time.
Beware of all technical innovation. The person it benefits may not be you.
