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Swedish Chef visits combo drive?

PostPosted: Sat Apr 05, 2003 8:53 am
by Ricyn
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.

PostPosted: Sat Apr 05, 2003 3:39 pm
by CDRecorder
Welcome to CDRLabs!

Could you try the drive in another computer? This would establish whether something is wrong with your drive or whether it is a computer problem.

You might try re-installing your CD-Recording software.

Also, you might try upgrading the firmware. You can get it here at LG's web site. Your firmware is listed under the DVD-ROM category.

I hope this advice helps!