Latitude E-Series DVD Burner troubles

You will see from this thread that the burner issues have substantially disappeared. The Intel Matrix Storage software appears to be one of the causes of problems. Also Dell is using at least three different burners now.

The UJ-867 has the right height to fit in the bay, but you would need to carve up its fascia on order to fit the Dell quick release mechanism.

Personally, I prefer tray loaders. I tried a slot loader last year. They are noisier and, on one occasion, I had to dismantle it to get a disc out. Most do not support 8cm discs. I suspect quietness and better reliability are the reasons for Dell sticking with tray loaders for its business notebooks.

John

 

Ok, thanks John! I had a Lite-on 3.5" DVD-burner die on me after the first burn (actually it stopped reading DVD:s while still reading CD:s) so I can't say that I have confidence in Lite-on hardware yet!

 

John, if the drive is the right size and is SATA, would you not simply remove the fascia from the current drive and put it on the new drive? It's a generic mount. The quick release is on there with 2 screws.

Greg

 

Personally, I've had good experience with the Liteon burners over the years and my teething troubles with this on may not be the furner's fault.

]No quite so easy in this case: The proposed burner is a slot loader and the standard fascia has no slot.

John

 

hehe...
When I ordered a laptop replacement some time ago, I got that optical drive.. wow that's bad. So I swap the optical drive from my previous one to the new one. And now I enjoy pretty quiet drive.

 

Which was the good one and which the bad one, in your opinion?

John

 

This post intends to put more info about the troubleshooting I ran into when my DVD burner stopped working. I fixed it, however, I took me lot of time to figure how to fix it, but happily it is now working.

I have a TSSTcorp DVD+-RW TS-U633A device in a Brand New DELL 6500 that we bought on Late November 2008, Windows Vista Ultimate 32 Bits included.

I upgraded into Windows Vista Bussines 64Bit (Taken from our MS SLA agreement), the device continued working. Couple weeks later, I received a Windows Vista Ultimate 64 Bits Upgrade from Dell, so I installed an immediately I noticed that the DVD stopped to respond. I didn't come immediately with Dell Support because they told me that by the time that I would upgrade to 64 bits, they would not be able to help me anymore on this computer, so I started to troubleshoot the problem for myself.

I followed most of the recommendations of this thread but none of them worked: I tried to locate the most recent Windows Vista 64 bit driver or latest firmware, but I never could locate it neither at Dell or Samsung websites, tried to unistall the device driver; I also reinstalled _all_ the Dell software, but none of those solutions worked out.

I tried to uninstall the Driver using the device manager, it didn't work.

I tried to remove cdrom.sys and cdrom.PNF to reinstall it, it didn't work.

Finally, I found that my device was "hidden" because it had filters over it, I really didn't understand that, but with that piece of information I found that I had to remove the entry 'UpperFilters' from the windows Registry Editor list:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E965-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}.

Be careful, make a backup of your Registry as recommended.

Later on, I found this same solution at: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929461 under the title "The CD drive or the DVD drive does not work as expected on a computer that you upgraded to Windows Vista" that describes this procedure with lot more of detail.

At least, my DVD burner can read DVD's, I haven't tried to burn a DVD yet, but I'll do it soon, if there is another problem, I will let you guys know.

Hopefully this solution would help someone in the future.

Cheers!

 

Go to http://support.dell.com and select the E6500 drivers. Then look under the "SATA Drives" and download the Intel Matrix Storage Manager. This will fix all CD/DVD burning issues. I found this resolution in an article last week after months of headaches trying to support my end users at work with this problem.

 

Has anyone had any problems with either of the following two burners? Especially with dual layer media?
Hitachi GSA-U20N
Panasonic UJ-862A
I have an original and replacement system from dell, each with one of these. I am not sure which drive to keep. Anyone have anything they want me to try on either. I don't have any Dual Layer media to try out

 

Try them and compare.
This is what I did. I had to choose between the Panasonic one and the Toshiba one. The Toshiba made this "bzzzurt" sound every time it boots/power-up, and that was annoying, also the edject button was too easily pressed which added to the annoyance. Oh and the Panasonic one read disks 1-2 second faster... but it also consumed more power (1.6A instead of 1.3A like the Toshiba). Reading CD and DVD produce similar sound level on both.

So I kept the Panasonic one.

I never burned dual layer disks, but either way.. if it doesn't work the day you do it, just contact Dell tech support for a new drive, or if they know a possible fix to the problem. It's just a drive.. I think they can send you that thing and you do the swap...