M17x R3 Optical Drive Issue

Hi guys. While working on importing my CD music collection to my R3, I've been experiencing some issues. When I slot in certain discs (for example Kill Bill vol.1 soundtrack) the optical drive makes clunking noises as if it's struggling to work out what's been inserted, and pretty much fails to settle down. Sometimes it'll eventually register that music is on the disc, but importing fails, and when I play a piece of music directly from the disc (with or without iTunes), the sound is very degraded and crackly.

These discs work perfectly on every other device I've tried, including my old laptop which even imported them flawlessly, so I know it's the R3 that's screwing up. The weird thing is most discs work fine on this R3 during playback and importing. Can't think why a select few aren't playing ball.

The optical drive in question is a PLDS DVD+-RW DL-8A4SH. Can't find an up-to-date driver to replace the 2006 one, but tried a driver reinstall anyway to no avail. Also ran both Alienware and Windows 7 pro diagnostic programs, but neither seemed to detect the issue. Also tried a clean boot via msconfig, but that didn't help either.

I'll probably call Dell Support tomorrow, but figured you guys may have encountered this before. Any ideas what's going on, or how to resolve this?

 

Howdy Newbie. Welcome to the forums. :hi2:

Most likely you're optical drive is probably failing. Don't be surprised. The ODDs going into the Alienwares aren't exactly top quality. The other possibility is the discs have some sort of encryption protection that the ODD's firmware isn't programmed for. I've seen this in older DVD players trying to playback newer DVDs. There won't be any drivers specific to the ODD as most (if not all) systems use the generic Windows disk drivers for the ODDs. Get in touch with Alienware support. They will most likely tell you to completely reinstall Windows (which is ridiculous and unnecessary..so don't do it) before they send a replacement ODD.

 

Please send us an e-mail to [email protected] and we'll help you with the warranty replacement.