Troubleshooting an Optical Drive - Optiarc AD-7560S

My CD/DVD burner is no longer reading disks - it makes a lot of loud noises and often fails to open them. I don't associate the loading of any new software with the problem. When it opens DVDs the video often skips and stalls. Not continuously, but every 5 or 10 minutes. It seems to open blank disks fine and Nero seems to be burning fine. I thought something might be up with the hardware, but then I realized that it seems to be opening disks fine the two times I tried in safe mode so....

I removed all the DVD-associated software I can think of (except Nero, which is my last bet). I uninstalled the drive, cleaned the laser head with some alcohol, and re-installed. No luck. I heard about the registry filter deletion, but my key doesn't have those subkeys.

Any other place I should be looking? Would software really stop me from even being able to explore a DVD in windows explorer?

 

This issue was common years ago when the laser either got dirty or failed, or the motor itself was failing. If it worked fine in safe mode though, that rules out hardware.

Did you try reinstalling Windows and seeing if that clears it up? Or if you have system restore enabled, roll back to a time before you noticed any issues with it.

 

Optical drives actually have a pretty high failure rate and it is definitely possible that the drive is going bad and it can't be fixed. I actually had a similar issue with an optical drive in my desktop and I eventually gave up on the trouble shooting and just replaced it to save me the headaches lol.

The nice thing about Sager units is that they are so easily upgradeable, so changing it out should be a simple process for you and you can pick up a pretty inexpensive notebook disc drive to install in there. If the windows reinstall or restore doesn't fix it, I would personally go that route.

 

Thanks for the suggestions. I think I will go ahead and just buy a new one. Even in safe mode it's not consistently opening.

Much appreciated.