Thinkpads Forum

ref: ThinkPad Multi-Burner Plus Ultrabay Enhanced Drive (73P3312) , which is a Matshita UJ830S, installed in either of two A31's. (has some kind of an adapter sleeve on it to make it fit).

This burner used to work fine for burning DVDs and I have gone through several 100-packs of DVD-R's, although it never burned any higher than 2x speed - it did at least work. I have been happy enough with it.

Starting a month or so ago, it got picky about reading back the DVDs that it had created, although those same DVDs would read fine in a DVD-ROM Ultrabay or CD-RW/DVD-ROM Ultrabay - so it is not the DVDs that are the problem.

This same burner can still read CDs, and commercially prepared DVDs - but can't read it's own home-made DVDs. If the laser was burning out or something - wouldn't it stop reading all media? I am not sure what is going on.

sausage888 wrote:I have gone through several 100-packs of DVD-R's

Its quite possibly just worn out. The lasers do have a finite life.

Cheers,

Bill B.

The mechanical components (the rails etc) also wear and the fine tolerance needed to track the grooves of an optical disk becomes diminished over time and electronic error correction can only compensate for so much wear.

It may be time to replace the drive, sorry to suggest.

Just as a follow-up, I replaced the Matshita UJ830S with Lenovo part 39T2723 purchased from eBay, which has basically identical specs as the 73P3312. I asked the seller if it would be another Matshita (fearing poor mileage on the first one), and he told me he had both Matshita's and Hitatchi's available in this part number. I requested the Hitatchi model, which turned out to be an LG Electronics GSA-T20N (hint, hint - you can probably buy these as bare drives).

I swapped out the Ultrabay2000 adapter from the first one onto the replacement and it works fine and resolves all of my issues - so it was the multi-burner lens that was the problem.

Also, the 39T2723 came with more current versions of RecordNow and WinDVD (I use both), so I am assuming that the 39T2723 is more current than my former 73P3312. Note that for the first time I was able to burn DVDs at 8x with the Hitatchi model - so thumbs down to Matshita (Panasonic) which could never do more than 2x...