s96j crappy aopen drive will not burn dvds

My roommate's crappy s96j has an aopen isu-8424e drive. It has always had problems from the start with burning dvds period. Blank dvds do not show up in My Computer but it will still burn in Nero if that drive is chosen. After burning, the disc, the disc is fine and can be read on OTHER drives other than the aopen drive. In other words, the disc is burnt correctly, but whether blank or not, any recordable DVD+-R media will not be recognized for reading in the drive. We have tried both taiyo yuden and ritek dvd media but I don't think this is a media problem as all the discs burned would be readable on everything BUT the aopen drive.

My roommate sent it to get it fixed but the reseller sent it back to him, telling him he had tried various media and there is nothing wrong with the drive itself. That leads us to conclude there is some sort of software problem or that something is wrong with his s96j laptop specifically (we only sent the aopen drive, not the whole laptop). Please advise if you have any solutions or suggestions.

Some additional information is that in device manager, for primary ide channel the hard drive shows up as devise 0 with nothing on device 1. On the secondary ide channel, the device 0 shows nothing but device 1 shows the aopen drive and the dma mode is 2. Is this normal to have these two drives on two different channels with two different device id numbers? Dunno, might be relevant or not.

Oh, and he just said "oooh my laptop sucks..." while I was typing this. So someone has got to help him as he is really is a downer mood right now and he has a big exam today that he didn't really study for and is worried about.

In the meantime, since it might be a software problem, he is going to format if nothing can be figured out in the next 24 hours. WoW is a b**ch to install so that is one reason formatting is a last resort and it might not solve the problem period, but we shall see later...

 

Someone's gotta know something. Yeah, its gonna be crazy in this dorm room if my roommate doesn't get his laptop fixed. He's gonna go mad without WoW.

 

if you have a laptop, you can always try swapping your optical drive with his.

 

my laptop has the same device id's are yours so there isnt a problem there.

Perhaps the repair agent is right, and you're using crappy media.

or

The drive is truly buggered

insane