Cameron L. Spitzer wrote:
... Over time I collected nine drives that stopped working: some wrote bad disks, others got read errors. Took the cases off and cleaned the lenses carefully with aqueous isopropyl "rubbing" alcohol on cotton swabs. Eight of the nine work perfectly now. Try it. The key is to remove the extra alcohol before it dries and leaves a residue. Use a wet swab and then a dry one.
Didn't know that. Thanks for the tip. I've three old cdrw drives lying around here somewhere. I'll give them a try.
Note, even a perfectly good brand new CD-RW drive will write bad CDs if you burn at full speed. The maximum writing speed on modern CD blanks is very optimistic. Try burning at half the automatically detected speed, or 16x, whichever is slower. You will get a much higher yield. Your disks will be readable in marginal drives that can not read disks burned at full speed. Also, don't waste your time with CD-RW media. I have tried several brands and none erases well. Second burn yield is under 50%. Third burn is near zero.
I cannot confirm this completely. 1. I had some 25 Memorex cdrw's which all failed completely. I was able to burn them once, and didn't even get acces to them no more after that. They just wouldn't mount and thus were completely useless, so I threw them all away. 2. I have some 40 Nashua and 20 BenQ cdrw's, which turned out to be pretty good. I've only had to throw a couple of Nashua cdrw's away after heavy use, say burn/erase 30 times or more. With BenQ I didn't have this problem up to now but I haven't used them as heavily as the Nashua ones. The Nashua's are about 3 years old and the BenQ about 1 year. 3. I have a lot of Verbatim cdrw's that behave correctly: 8-12x speed; 16-24x speed and 32x speed, which I all burn at max. speed. (My LG cdrw-drive allows burning speeds up to 32x, but I'd never tested these 32x burned cd's on another drive.) So far I didn't encounter any problems with Verbatim. I even use them (8-12x) to burn audio/mp3 and I don't notice any difference with cd-r's (although for audio/mp3, I burn at the lowest possible speed).
Manon.