CD/DVD drive crunching

[thinkpad1]

I have a DVD containing several PDF files. Mostly e-books. It's a DVD-R Taiyo Yuden disc.

I tried to access it but all I got was crunching sounds forever, it seems like. Was it trying to continuously read the disc?

There were also messages to insert a disc into the DVD/CD drive.

I was able to easily access the files on a Pentium 3 SFF desktop that had a Linux OS installed.

Anyone have any theories?

Is it not compatible with Windows? I am running XP SP3. They are primarily pdfs. Why can't I access the files and why does the drive continually make crunching or grinding noises? I hope it's not doing anything to my disc!

One of the major disadvantages to these old laptops, imho, are the HORRIBLE DVD drives they have! Not even a DVD capable burner!

[rkawakami]

Most noise that comes from optical drives would be the carriage assembly moving back-and-forth as it tries to read the disk. I'd say that your laptop's drive is probably having some problems with reading/recognizing your disk. There are several things you should try:

- install another DVD-R disk and see if it can read that one
- install a regular DVD disk (i.e., not a self-burned one) and see if it can read it
- try CD disks as well; CDROM, CD-R and CD-RW

You have already determined that the disk is readable in another system so I'd suspect your drive is the source of the problem.

[thinkpad1]

Maybe my drive can't read this particular disc or Taiyo Yuden discs in general?

I have played DVD movies and loaded live Linux CDs with this laptop and there weren't any problems.

[rkawakami]

That might be possible but if we are talking about a T4x DVD drive, I would think those drives are recent enough that they are capable of reading DVD-R disks. What is the FRU number of the drive?

[thinkpad1]

That might be possible but if we are talking about a T4x DVD drive, I would think those drives are recent enough that they are capable of reading DVD-R disks. What is the FRU number of the drive?

I have no idea. It's probably the stock drive.

According to Lenovo website:
16x10x24x/8x CD-RW/DVD

08K9865 (HLDS) ????
62P4556 ?????

[thinkpad1]

I tried the DVD in another computer and booted up Windows XP. It could read the DVD fine.

I tried another DVD in the Thinkpad's optical DVD drive with avi files on it and it read it. So, I don't get it...

[Tasurinchi]

So, I don't get it...

I have similar issues from time to time with my laptops and also with the desktops at home. Sometimes a specific DVD drive won't read a specific DVD brand. If I were you I wouldn't break my mind trying to find the cause. Copy the content of the DVD in a USB drive (provided you have one with enough space) and then copy your ebooks to your laptop.

My 0.02 cents...

[thinkpad1]

I like that idea. I should have thought of it, originally. But, it is troubling that the CD-R/DVD optical drive had problems with that disc. I should try a blank DVD-R of that brand and see if it handles it okay? It is just peculiar and I hope my drive isn't failing. Those things aren't cheap!

[Tasurinchi]

Sure it's a good idea to check that the drive isn't failing. But as you said you could install software and watch DVDs before, my gut feeling says it's just this particular DVD media the cause of the problem.

You may also check that the DVD-R is not scratched or damaged...

Cheers

[dr_st]

Likely that the drive is failing. I've seen this symptom on many Ultrabay Slim burners. Usually they don't go from 100% to 0% at once, but stop reading specific disks, or specific disk types, while others work fine, or start producing more coasters while burning, or failing to burn specific media types, etc.

Every time it was solved by replacing the drive.

The old drive can still function for a long time and read/write most media types fine.

[thinkpad1]

Likely that the drive is failing. I've seen this symptom on many Ultrabay Slim burners. Usually they don't go from 100% to 0% at once, but stop reading specific disks, or specific disk types, while others work fine, or start producing more coasters while burning, or failing to burn specific media types, etc.

Every time it was solved by replacing the drive.

The old drive can still function for a long time and read/write most media types fine.

I agree with your theory. I don't use the drive for CD burning as I use my desktop for that.

I think it's that specfiic disk since it is fine in other computers and therefore, other optical drives. Not sure why it's that specific one but for now, I'll use my usb thumb drive when I want access to those files at my laptop. It was more annoying than anything else and if the optical drive is failing, I'll likely run into another similar situation eventually.

[rkawakami]

I've been using an old version (4.79) of the utility program DVDInfoPro for the last two years to test out optical drives (and media). It's not perfect; it has a tendency to hang at times and then you have to kill it with Task Manager or it takes some time to return control after it has completed an operation. Don't know if the latest version has these bugs but you can download the program and try it out for 2 weeks. It basically tells you the formats that the optical drive is supposed to support and there's a CRC test for reading disks. That test reads each data sector on the disk and reports if it read without errors or not. It can only read data that exists on the disk; running the CRC test on a DVD-RW that only has 10MB written to it will only check those first few sectors. If there's a problem with the carriage positioning at locations further into the disk, you'll never see it in that case.

ref: http://www.dvdinfopro.com/

[Whiterabbit]

I had this problem and worried it required replacement. I had all the symptoms mentioned in this thread.

Then I noticed that there was some play up and down with the CD drive in the bay. So apparently what happened is at some point the drive got "crushed" while it was out of the computer, tweaking the top of the drive just enough to "scrape" the top of the CD at one point in the cd rotation.

Again, this only happened on select CDs.

What did I do?

I opened the CD tray as if I was loading a CD, stuck my thumbs in the drive, and applied gentle pressure to the top plate of the drive. Bent it back up. Just very gentle pressure.

--------------

Drive works like a champ now. No replacement required.