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Hey all, great forum with lots of great tidbits of information.

I've got an old Ricoh mp7120a 12/10/32 drive that's been giving me trouble. For the past 6 months or so, when you put a CD in the drive, it didn't inform win2kpro that there was a disc in the drive. Even when you tried to browse using the file system, it said the drive was empty.

However, during this time, I was still able to open Nero and burn blank CD-R's. For some reason Nero could tell that there was media in the drive. Well, now that bit of useful functionality has gone away as well. Nero keeps seeing the drive empty as well.

I reflashed the latest firmware, though I was already there anyway. Tried several different brands of discs and still nothing. So obviously something is wrong with the drive. The slow degradation makes me think this might be a cleanliness or alignment issue.

I'm planning to just get a new burner, but I'm also decent with a wrench and was wondering if anybody might have some suggestions as to where to start poking around to see if I can resurect this drive. TIA

Tim

Welcome to CDRLabs, Bookerdog!

I agree that the drive is probably broken, but I would suggest uninstalling the drive in Device Manager and rebooting to let Windows re-install the drive. Also, it might be a good idea to make sure that Auto Insert Notification is turned on.

In situations like this, it's a good idea to do a soft-eject and then put the disc back in, and try reading the files again. Dying RW drives always do this to me.

I have a Ricoh 2X that I got waaaay back in 1997, and media detection is one of the most common problems. It gets to the point where you put a disc in, and it can't detect it at all and the read light just blinks on and off no matter what you do. The problem was that there was too much grease on the spindle and I just opened the drive and cleaned that part with rubbing alcohol. Then it was back to normal, but the problem came back a few times.

This drive is sitting in my work PC right now, I still burn emergency RWs with it sometimes.

The laser pickup lense could be dirty. A freinds Ricoh 1420 2x was doing that and it turned out the lense was so dirty it looked cloudy gray. I gently cleaned it till it was gleaming again and it worked fine. The drive was at least 3 years old and had done hundreds of burns by then. It was a very good little drive, very slow but the audio results were always flawless with it.