My CD writer (a 2-year old Aopen CRW1632, 16x10x32x) appears to have passed away, but before I go and buy a new one, I wanted to check in case anyone here had any bright ideas to save it
Yesterday I decided to start making inroads on the stack of cheap blank CDs I was given for free two or three years ago. I loaded up Nero as usual, did some simulations to find a suitable write speed for them, and only 4x worked. So I wrote one at 4x and got a write error halfway through. Another one, again at 4x, got a write error at about 5% done. So far I haven't lost anything except my free CDs, so no biggie.
So, I go back to using the last of my stack of unbranded silver-silver CDs. They've always worked fine at 8x, but today I get a medium speed error. Later, after a reboot and making sure nothing else is running, I try again with a different CD from the same stack and get a power calibration error.
Then I popped in a 48x-rated branded CD which have always worked fine at 16x (the fastest my writer will do). When I go to the burn tab in Nero, I can't select a speed, and the bottom of the window says "Waiting for the drive to become ready..." and never seems to do anything. Windows XP's own writing feature claims there isn't a blank CD in the drive. The drive light was blinking on and off regularly a couple of times a second.
I've since tried an audio CD, a burnt data CD and a pressed data CD in the drive and it doesn't detect any of them.
So should I be buying a new drive, or is there anything else I could try?