I have a Samsung SH-S183L burner running on a Toshiba Satellite laptop. I have used this combo for about a year now and have had over 200 sucessful burns. Today though, something has gone wrong. The burner turns on and the light comes on, but the tray refuses to open. I have uninstalled and reinstalled, but it did nothing. Under the device manager, it says that everything is working great. Also I noticed that in my computer it reads the drive, but labels it as a cd-drive instead of a DVD/CD RW drive as it normally had. I have tried the drive on another laptop in the house (Compaq) and I get the same results. This problem all started when I attempted to back up the movie 300. I had been having problems burning with DVD Shrink and so I have been converting the files into ISO for the last week or so and then burning with Image Burn. Worked great with about 4 movies. Today I tried something new. I put 300 into the SH-S183L to rip it with DVD Shrink as I was attempting 2 movies at once. When I clicked backup on the DVD shrink, it asked me for the region, which I selected as USA. Thats when the trouble began. I had to stick a pin into the drive to manually eject the tray and get 300 out. Ever since then, the thing has been dead. Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks.
Do you hear any sounds when its suposed to open. A click, grind, small bump or anything? The only time this happened to me is when the tray was out and the drive either dropped on the tray or banged against something. I have always been able to recover from this. In all cases the only thing that happened was the tray got knocked off alignment. This means you have to open the drive and get the tray back on track. If this sounds like your case I will give instruction. You wont belive how many "dead" drives I have been given then I got them back on track followed by a resale. -Del
No there arn't any sounds coming from the drive when I hit the button. Any help with realigning the track would be much appreciated. Thanks
Since you report no sonds this may not be your issue but there is one thing to try. You will need a desktop to do this. Remove the drive from the housing. Are you sure it doesnt even bump out a tiny bit? 1) Open the drive housing by removing whatever screws are there. (You may have to look under the rubber feet to find some of the screws but only do that if needed. Putting those feet back on is not always easy without super glue). 2) After the housing is open remove the entire IDE drive from it. 3) Now place the drive in a desktop as an IDE device. Try it out in that setting. You dont need to get to windows to open the drive. As soon as power gets to it try and open it. You can try and use it in windows if you wish. -Del
