burner not working, wastes ty's, hitachi driver needed? not sure. can't find driver (xp)

Please help me get my burner working right again! It stopped since I reinstalled XP. Nero OEM 6 progresses burning what looks normal until the end, then it acts weird with the light blinking on and off once per second, and it spins up and slows down every 10 seconds. Nero lags a bit but then lets me close it, but otherwise everything else is fine. After listening and watching it wind up and slow down for a minute, I pressed eject, and a minute later it finally stops this nuttiness and ejects. I've wasted two Taiyo Yuden's already, I hope I just need a driver. These are authentic TY's. The discs come out burned but are not readable, they won't read at all when I reinsert them back in. This is done at 4x speed with 4 gigs of data in data mode. I can't figure out what to do. I rebooted for the second try. This feels hopeless. Makes me want to smash things.

I reinstalled the OS a month ago, everything else is fine. My desktop computer is 7 years old, a Gateway. The burning was working perfectly before the reinstall. But being way old means no warrenty support.

I'll explain what I've discovered so far:

I'm not sure how to determine the correct info is needed here, but I think you need the burner model which I believe is: HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GSA-4040B, which is Hitachi apparently. This is just regular one-sided technology. I tried fruitlessly to find a driver or something to install to on both Gateway and Hitachi's sites. For Gateway's site, I input my serial number, but then it asks me which series and specific computer part, but I don't know it. None of the tiny documentation included says which series it is, so I don't know which to pick. There's hundreds of identical looking support pages. The included restoration CD doesn't have any drivers for the DVD-ROM, just other stuff like cpu, motherboard, video card. Then I read HLDS means Hitachi, so I googled Hitachi but only find HARDDRIVES and not burners. Grar. I'm clueless what to do next.

So I don't know where to get the right driver, or even if that's the correct solution. I'm fresh out of ideas.

I thank you all in advance! I trust this forum, I'm willing to follow instructions to try it out. This is where I learned about TY's. I have to fix this, I have to burn 60 gigs soon hopefully!

Ian

 

burners are burners.. they don't need specific drivers as they rely on the aspi/scsi emulation on the bus.. that explains why you can't find any.

the other problem sounds mechanical more than anything.. what errors do you get?

 

No error message.

I have my doubts it's the hardware that died between reinstallations. Everything works fine, just nero's a little laggy and a little noisy at the end. Both DVDs were written to the near-edge, as it should for 4 gigs of data.

Not too sure what "emulation on the bus" is, but thanks for mentioning it. So now my driver theory is out the window, but doubt it's hardware. Isn't there something software-related that could be missing from a reinstallation?

 

how about we start from scratch. forget i typed all that. my burner's not working. what should i do?

 

Do you get an error log? maybe the drive is in PIO mode(look for "How to turn DMA on"...
Try ImgBurn instead, this way you can find out if Nero might be the culprit..