please can someone help me I have an acer l410 desktop pc st3160815as ata device and optirac dvd rw ad-7640 only 5 months old and recently my dvd rw discs are not reading when inserted they do have files on them and im stumped please help thanks in advance p.s ive also tries updating drivers
There are two possibilities. One is that the discs are degrading, but if you have more than one and none is reading I would discard that. Second is that the laser on your burner is getting weak. If you have an access to other computer, try them there. If they work, than it is your drive. DVD-RW are not very stable, I would not use them for data storage, specially if it is an important stuff.
yes it says device is working properly in device manager and to other comment does this mean its on the way out thanks for posts
DVD-RW and DVD+RW are not unstable media if properly manufactured. They get the reputation for instability for reasons other than their chemistry or design: 1) conflicts in formatting and/or packet-writing software corrupt their address systems and prevent data from being read; or 2) differences in the laser focal patterns of recording drives can reduce the signal-to-noise ratio of the tracking information enough that discs recorded (or even just played) in different recording drives can no longer be legible. You do not mention whether your discs are DVD-RW or DVD+RW. There is a big difference between the two. DVD-RW media are designed for sequential video recording. That means that data can be added to them until they fill up. "Erasing" a file simply means taking its address away--no capacity is gained. These discs typically need formatting before recording, depending on your writing software. DVD+RW media are data and video designs: erasing data regains the capacity those data took up. Formatting occurs in the background while other work is being done. A rewritable disc ought to be assigned to a single drive in a single computer. If it must be used in another computer, it should ideally go into a DVD-ROM or CD-ROM drive, not a writer, in order to avoid having the writer attempt to put information on it that can corrupt the original information. Your data files are very likely still on the discs. You may need to get recovery software that will artificially create a table of contents to recover the data long enough to transfer the files. Once you have done that, do a full erasure over each disc in a drive you will use with them for now on. Do not use other drives unless they are DVD-ROM drives. Experiment with data that you have backed up elsewhere in case your drive may be the culprit because of insufficient writing power (DVD+/-RW information is formed by melting a semi-metal alloy on the disc to create dull spots; reheating--not melting--recrystallizes the alloy so that it appears shiny again). Changing recording software can also cause problems with rewritable formats, so try to avoid any change at all for rewritable discs.
