DVD Drive Issue

Bleh.... appears my DVD drive has bit the dust. Spent an hour on the phone with Dellienware support who were none too pleased to hear I had ditched the Alien Restore partition (well, I did install a whole new HD.... like I was going to clone that when I upgraded to Win7). After throwing a huffy, had me drain the motherboard (remove battery/AC and hold power for 20s) then go into registry and remove the UpperFilter from the driver (which didn't make sense as when I booted to Ubuntu Live (thumb drive), still wasn't reading discs).

Somehow, the drive spun back to life briefly, but a power cycle later it's gone again. Has anyone had the honor yet of the on-site trying to replace the DVD drive? I will probably call back soon to schedule it as the drive is definitely dead; and it sounds like one of the GPU fans is starting to grind.

I know worse case is they'll break the touch strip, which would suck because I use the media controls a lot; but from what I understand is that them screwing up the repair can equal a new m17x for me.....

 

yes, I had mine done in the first month.

The Tech had to pretty much dissassemble the entire laptop to get to the drive.

I watched the whole thing to make sure he did not screw it up.

Dell would not let me change it myself, even though I done so many times

 

Okay, Dell/Unisys tech came out... took about 2 hours to do the tear down, swap, re-assemble, and test. Now have an HL-DT-ST GA31N drive.... not ideal as it appears to be very finicky on the disc quality (wouldn't read my Win7 upgrade DVD that has a visible foil warp but reads in everything else, but read Fallout 3 and "True Blood" Season 2/Disc 1).

Anyone know if there is a newer firmware (using A102) for this drive?

 

Quick Update: To be honest, didn't use the DVD drive after the install.

Rented a DVD from the automated kiosk at work, put it in.... PC doesn't read it. Not only that, but it wouldn't eject nor do anything else. Two restarts and a full wipe (-ac, -battery, 20s, +ac, +battery) later it finally came out during Windows startup.

I just recently tore down to clean out the SLI heatsink fins.... will take it a step further tomorrow and see if by chance one of the ribbon cables that connects to DVD drive may be loose.... I know the tech had trouble getting the drive case and cables back together, so I hope maybe it's just something loose there or at the motherboard. Otherwise I got to call the tech out again for a motherboard swap, which means they'll want to do a system wipe.... argh.

 

Yeah had them replace the dvd drive in my M17x today (swapped out a bad ts-t633c for a hl-dt-st ga31n) which seems to read fine but it had some trouble writing a dvd+r dl disc. I can't seem to find next to any information about this drive online - anyone know if it supports dual layer, lightscribe (probably not), ...? Because if it doesn't even burn a dual layer I'm getting another drive, this computer is too expensive for that.