Fishy Burning Problem

[suprafreak6]

Heres the deal folks, my dvd-rw burner stopped being able to burn cd's a while ago, i was okay with that cause i had an actual cd-rw burner in too so i used that, now neither works...im thinking its fishy. what happens is it burns the tracks, but the first track is the only one that works. wierd...and so i tried another burning program. that didnt help. is it a plain and simple broken burner?

[Broken]

How old are the burners an how much use do they get?
I use mine heavily. I burn in the neighborhood of around 400 disc a year, and about a year is how long they tend to last. Maybe not even that long since I have started using LightScribe... guess I'll see.

[suprafreak6]

well the dvd-rw is maybe 3 to 4 and the cd-rw is about 6 probably or something

think its about time for some new drives? ones that probably should match my case haha

so you guys guess its probably the drive right? cause if so i mean im gonna try to get some money, and then go get em

[Broken]

Four years old and six years old...?
It just might be time to replace them.

[Appzalien]

Have you ever run a cleaning disk in any of them? When air gets sucked into the computer along with dust, it doesn't just go thru the fans, as you may have noticed if you have pulled out a rom drive covered with dust. Well that dust doesn't just get pulled onto the outside of the drive but the inside too. Get one of those lens cleaning disks and a can of compressed air. Open the drive tray and blow out the drive from one side and then the other, try not to blow any frosty stuff. Then run the cleaning disk to remove any dust from the lens.

As a side fix I like to reinstall the drivers for the drive and sometimes reinstall the firmware (or upgrade if theres a new version). Reinstalling the drivers is simple, go to your Device Manager and find the drive and rightclick uninstall. then just reboot and windows will reinstall the generic drivers it uses for all rom drives. If these drivers get corrupted the drives will not work correctly.

While your in the Device Manager, at the top click on view and select "show hidden devices" and look in "Non-Plug and Play Drivers" for anything about Starforce. Some games install starforce drivers as a copy protection scheme but even the creators of the starforce protection scheme warn the distributors that they can not only cause problems but in some cases destroy the drives. If you find Startforce drivers google "Remove Starforce Drivers", download the utility and remove them.