LiteOn 52X24X52 Bad Writes

[TCrowe]

Hey all,

Don't know what happened. My LiteOn has been working nearly perfect for 4-5 months then last week 90% of the VCD/SVCD produce green blocks and picture break-ups near the end of playback.

Two weeks ago I added a PCI controller and new hard drive but everything was working fine, my LiteOn was not attached to this new controller only the new HD. Everything was working great for about a week then all of the sudden bad discs, burned fine but playback was jacked. Tried both CDR and CDRW media, various brands with the same results.

After reading some of the other posts sounds like I should just replace the thing. Should I just replace the drive? I mean have unintsalling/reinstalling NERO & CDRwin, wipe the ASPI and reinstall (using the ALLWAYS faithful Doom9 recommended version), moving the LiteOn to it's own IDE port on the controller with a new cable.

Any advice? Give up buy a new drive? Can anyone recommend a good replacement?

XP/1.4 Athlon/1GB RAM

[Lord of the Discs]

Return it and get your money back, Lite On is no good. Then go
buy a Plextor or, if it´s too expensive, an LG (I have an LG 48x
since allmost a year and it works good (burning at 32-40x).

LotD

[rchiang]

I had the same problem with both a TEAC 16X and a Cyndyne Lightening IV 40X burner. When I was buring bad discs, my CPU case was crammed with 1 CD-ROM, 1 CD-ROM burner, 2 hard drive, 1 floppy, 512M RAM, 4X AGP video card, Firewire card, ATA 133 IDE card, modem card, plus 6 fans, and an under-powered power supply. I was blaming the the cheap media for all the trouble. One day, my PS just died on me. I got an Antec 350 Watt PS with dual fans, and all my burning problem went away.

I don't have a shred of proof that power supply/excess heat may contribute to buring bad disks, after all, all my data discs burned fine, just the SVCDs are bad. All I know is that when I upgraded to a beefier PS with better ventilation, all works well.

Hope this helps.

[TCrowe]

I have an Antec 350 already in the system.

The more I test and read it is simply the drive. The last test is getting it into my brothers rig and checking.

All is good though. I am going to buy a new CenDyne DVD Burner, finally a DVDr burner. The CenDyne CDICD00208 (Nec1300a) has 24X CDR capabilities, although I believe that is a misprint and it is only 16X.

[alexnoe]

Plextor-Mania. LOL!
Use better media, and your LiteOn will work.

In case you burned 4x, because some weird PC magazine made up that this would improve write quality, that was another fault.

[TCrowe]

I understand the argument for better media but I have the same issues with my CD-RW discs, which are good media.

[alexnoe]

Define "good media".

The only good CD-RW media are Ricoh and Mitsubishi.

[TCrowe]

Well good to me are a stack of Memorex that I have used in this and other drives for over a year. We could argue that Memorex is a crap brand but they have worked without any issue. As for CDR, I use cheap media but they have always worked until now. Aside from that I am getting my DVD-R tommorow and plan on picking up some "good" CDR's for a final test before I ditch the drive out of the system completely.

[alexnoe]

Lol! Memorex! :scared: :scared:

That is InfoDisc crap....

Of course, a minority of drives can burn them readably, but that is pure chance. Actually, you could blame the burner for not spitting the thing out with a power calibration error...that's all.

CD-RW media tests (http://forum.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=60316)