Can DVD Drives Lose the Ability to Read DVDs?

[Hak Foo]

I've been having some zesty issues with CD reading.

My modern machine has two older optical drives. One started to give up the ghost, so I bought a new one, and noticed I was getting weird noisy CD rips. The old drives tend to get correct results when using software that references the AccurateRip database; the new one was off. Even playing audio CDs directly in Windows Media Player is noisy.

So I bought three units of another model (~$8 each used) that had a good reputation. None of them get appropriate results either.

Four drives all incapable of reading audio CDs reliably seems a bit iffy.

 

[twolazy]

 

[Grandcheapskate]

I was able to boot off an external DVD so Win 7 is now installed. Interesting tidbit...now that I have enabled the the multi card reader, it shows up as a drive letter under Win XP but not under Win 7. I installed Win 7 with the reader disabled so I do not know if it would have caused the same drive letter issue as when I installed Win XP.

 

[Hak Foo]

Just in case anyone is following my particular drama, I found that the drives that weren't reliable when hooked via direct SATA worked reliably through an old parts-box USB 2.0 to SATA/PATA adapter. Supposedly there's some noise about optical drives being happer in "IDE style" mode than "ACHI", but newer mainboards don't allow you to toggle that anymore. I've got a couple more adapters on order; I feel like what I should really do is just build up like an old duplicator cabinet, containing a hub and a bunch of different devices (LS-120 on PATA-USB, opticals on SATA-USB, and a Greaseweazle), so I can have All The Media even if I one day pick a case without external-facing drive bays (man, new ones are a pain to find)