Sony DRU-530A unable to detect any type of disk

Guys;

This is my PC info:

AMD 2700XP
1gb Ram
2x 250Gb HDD
Soundbaster Audigy2
Sony DRU-530A (with firmware 2.1a)
TDK External DVD Burner DED-440N
_____________

When I put a blank DVD into my PC with Nero and I try to burn data on it, nero responds that it either there is no cd on the drive or the unit is broken. This happens with my DRU-530A from sony and with my External TDK DED-440N.

As I speak I just formatted my PC clean. I am going to install the drive again all alone as master to check what result do i get. I hope I can burn dvd's. If not you will see my rant in the followig lines...

Ugly

 

Heya Ugly- I'd look for updated ide and usb2 drivers for the motherboard. Don't forget SP1.

 

All my drivers are updated... I have a second PC at home that has SP2 and it does the same...

I formatted my pc, it has SP1, all the mobo drivers are updated. I am booting it as I type (I am on second pc), when I hit device manager and its sees the dvd drive as a sony dru-530a.

I fire up Nero, put in a blank Sony DVD-r disk and load up the iso image i have been trying to burn for the past week...

When I hit burn image, it brings me the final settings windows and wen I hit burn it says Waiting for the drive to become available. I already know that the all mighty Sony DRU-530A is fucked up and according to Nero, it is not initializing, because it might be defective.

Now if I burn a normal CDR it works as a charm. And to say I would recommend sony products to everyone when i used to work at compusa... let me hope I bought their replacement warranty.. or unless you all pity me and send me a buck or your old dvd burner i dont think this drive has a solution...

So to summarize:

1. Installed it on a brand new PC
2. Updated drivers, firmware, Service pack
3. Installed nero clean
4. tried to burn an image or watvh the bond concert
5. got a drive cannot initialize error (while burning DVD'as)
6. it burns cdr's okish.

What is left?

 

Oh.. and I forgot to mention.. that my external DVD Burner by TDK is doing exactly the same thing. Yes I have updated everything... but it does the same thing. It doesn't recognize my dvd media and it doesn't burn.

 

Maybe it's not the burners, but Nero? Do you have any other burning software? Did you try uninstalling the external burner just for the heck of it? When using Nero, you sure you've hit the "DVD" button, instead of the CD button (I made that mistake many times when I first got my DVD burner). You sure you're using an 80 conductor ide ribbon? You're hardrives aren't SATA connections are they? I've heard of issues with the optical drives when using serial connections for the hardrive(s). Check the DMA settings. BIOS shed any light? Check for spyware, viruses? I like http://www.pandasoftware.com for an online scan. It always cleans out trojans I occasionally pick up that Norton fails to clean. Best I can come up with off the top of my head. Keep us posted...

 

Well I know for a fact that this is not a Nero issue, because if it were I would be able to play dvd movies with my other programs. Or I would be able to read dvd-r's. But I can't.

I have tried to upgrade firmware 2.1b... it didn't work.. I downgraded the firmware to 1.0d, but it didn't work either. I reformatted my PC with a serbian version of Windows XP pro, and the drive didn't work either. I formatted it back with a normal version of Windows XP.

I am coming into the asumption that my DRU-530A was a Piece of Shat, and the DVD Burning portion of it broke down, while the CDR portion of it, works.

I think I am going to go to CompUSA to see if they find my receipt and hoping I had TAP (their warranty) so I can get a replacement back... If not I will be stuck with my brand new Sony DRU-530a that only burns and reads CD's.

Thanks Sony... I hope your PS3 burns in hell.
_X_X_X_X_X_[small]_________
Windows XP SP2 c2149
AMD Athlon 2700XP+
1gb Ram
2x 250Gb HDD
Sony DRU-530a v.2.1a[/small]

 

typo
_X_X_X_X_X_[small]_________
Windows XP SP2 c2149
AMD Athlon 2700XP+
1gb Ram
2x 250Gb HDD
Sony DRU-530a v.2.1a[/small]

 

Hi Ugly,heheee....I agree the Sony 530a sure is piece of shit. And their technical support even shitter. My first Sony 530a had problems occasionally and eventually broke down my XP system with an IDE fatal error. Luckily I was still in refund/exchange period at that time and exchange for another Sony 530a( I knew I should get a refund instead of exchange, but I got it pretty good price, so ... I am a cheap guy ;|)
Surprisedly, the second one works like a charm at least for 5 days till now, probably it is because of reintalling XP freshly, anyways, I only hope it could last longer that 1 year then I will not be blamed by my wife about this piece of shit I bought.

As first, I suspected that your Sony 530a itself may have some problem, but it is a strange thing that your TDK driver also doesn't work. Try to get an exchange first and we will see if it is a driver problem.

Damn Sony, everytime I bought something from them, I need to go back to do a exchange, my MD, my PS2, even my alarm clock, now this DVD writer, maybe I am so bad luck?

 

Heya Ugly- it blows that you're having so much trouble. But to have *2* drives not burning suggests to me it may be something else. Give this a shot: in your RUN box, type 'services.msc' w/out quotes. The XP Services window will open; scroll down to imapiService. If you see a "Start" or "restart service" button in upper left, click that button to restart the service. Then in the imapi line, right click, then left click properties, and set the service to manual or automatic.

This service is more for XP's built in burning program, but I've known of cases when this service was stopped, ALL burning stopped. Worth a try at least; I fixed a friend's system this way. I'd disconnect the external for troubleshooting purposes. I probably already asked, but did you check for an updated BIOS for your motherboard?

If you can't fix the thing, make it Sony's problem. At the Sony site, there's something you can download to send to Sony's tech support. Here's a link to Sony's DriveCheck: http://sony.storagesupport.com/cdrw/diagnostics.htm

Hope this helps.

PS-additional thoughts: what's your power-suppply? Could be you're underpowered. You ever have problems with random shutdowns? What kinda vid card you have. Happen to have an ATI card? As good as their latest cards are, I've known their drivers to just about kill a person's system. If you do have an ATI, you can give it a shot and uninstall their drivers via device manager. Last thought- after you reinstalled XP, you reinstall all the motherboard drivers??
_X_X_X_X_X_[small]Sil[/small]

 

I tried that but i still get the same response... It still doesn't read or wrote DVD's, but it sees CDR's and writes them well.

yup did that too all is up to date...

Sigh I have been trying for the past 10 minutes to run that program and all it keeps doing is ejecting my brand new blank dvd's...

My Power Supply is a Smart Blue from Antec, 350w. Yes I have an ati card (9500 Pro), but I use the omega drivers (omegadrivers.com). But I will give it a shot today... I will let you know on that... And yes i got all my mobo stuff up to date...

And to my unfortunate luck I couldn;'t get it replaced at compusa... now I just hope I can get an RMA from Sony...
_X_X_X_X_X_[small]_________
Windows XP SP2 c2149
AMD Athlon 2700XP+
1gb Ram
2x 250Gb HDD
Sony DRU-530a v.2.1a[/small]

 

Hi Ugly- hmmm..this is a tough one. I'd say 350 watts is pretty low, but I've never seen being underpowered not allow you to see a DVD. I'm still betting it's not the drive, but something with your system. Did the external EVER work, then you had a problem with the Sony?

How about this- slave the Sony to the master channel (don't forget to change the jumpers caps if you have to) and see what happens there. How's the dma settings? DMA, or PIO? BIOS give you any hints? How about going barebones for troublshooting; pull the vid card, 2nd HD, any other internal optical drive. Or....if you have another system, throw the Sony in there and see if it works. Believe me, I know how you feel. First time I go t the drive, I spent about 10 sleepless nights troubleshooting with various configs. I was able to burn CDs but not DVDs. I tried everything I could possibly think of, that's why I'm tossing pretty much everything at you.

Maybe the easiest thing to do is to pop it into another system. May save you alotta time in the long run. Hey, I just thought of something, re: CompUSA. CompUSA is NOTORIOUS for repackaging returned stuff and selling it as new. Still, the fact the external burner doesn't work suggests to me it's not the hardware. Well, since this is a relatively new burner, you shouldn't have any problem getting rma'd. Hope something works.

 

My PC is not underpowered. I have measured the power in all the consumption on the PC and its normal actually. But still even if it were it wouldn't be a reason for the DVD not to dvd burn. The external drive is no mine, its a frie3nd wh ohappens to be suffering the same thing, and I decided to test it on another pc. I tried also puttiong my sony on the other PC a AMD 2200 with a 350W PS, 512mb ram, etc. and the external and internal dives do the same.

I did that when I reformatted my PC. the DMA is on, but I have tried it on PIO and it does the same. The Bios is normal it doesn't have much to say in that dept. I tried setting the drive Auto and in its Atapi form, either way the bios sees it as a DVD Burner.

did that too. I have two pc's so I put the sony in the second one and that other PC doesn't have an ATI like my main pc does and it does the same issue.

Well to enlighten you, this is a standard issue breakdown in the drive according to about the 90% of websites i have visited... this drive just plainly sucks.

I tried it in a cd enclosure to use it on a usb port and it does the same...

Well when I bought it, I was working there, I managed to take the box of my burner and take it out of the crate and put it on the side to buy it later that evening. Out of all the hardware I ever bought in there it is the only piece i didn't put a TAP (replacement warranty) according to them I didn't anyways. I need to look for my receipt...

Can you explain to me how do I get an RMA please?

Thanks for all your help, patience and moral support at least that helps... when the stupid drive doesn't.

 

Hi silimtao,

I experienced a new problem with my Sony 530a last night and it read files I recorded on DVD fine but when come to playing DVD movies, it plays awhile and then freezes my system and I had to shutdown the power to reboot it. This situation happened 2 days after I put my old LG optical driver as slave using the same IDE cable. Sony 530a is set as master.

I tired a lot of ways to test what is the best way to make Sony 530a works fine and found out that if I only connect Sony 530a(set as master) alone and use the port in the middle of the 40pin-80 conductor IDE cable(The gray one) instead of using the black one on the end. It works great and is able to reach up to 7,000k/s when use DVD shrink (Solved my problem before only can reach up to 1,500K). But as I rememberd that for 80 conductor IDE cable, the gray one (In the middle if the cable) should be connected to slave drive and the black one should be connect to the master drive.

So here is my questions,
1. If I connect the gray one to the master, will there be any potential problem?
2. How should I set up to use the LG CD-RW/DVD Rom combo driver in the same time?
3. Currently how you connect your Sony 530a, Primary IDE or Secondary IDE? Master or Slave? 80 conductor or 40 conductor cable? If 80 pin, how you connect it to the Sony 530a Driver and do you have another optical drive connected on the same cable with Sony 530a?

Same as you, I have already spent a lot of sleepless night working on it and still cannot find a perfect solution.

Thanks

 

Hiya Ugly- wow this really blows, huh? Well, last question first: to get an RMA, you're gonna have to go through the wonderful experience of calling Sony tech support. The # I have is 1-800-588-3847 8-8 CT. They'll probably ask you to send them that diagnostic thing, then determine that your drive is in fact defective. Then they should give you an RMA # and you'll have to ship the damn thing to who knows where for repair.

I have to disagree with you on the PSU- on an older system, I had a power monitor, and when I burned something the power spiked like crazy; some burners just suck up power, some don't. That's why I never use less than a 450 watter. You don't happen to have a Dell, do you? I know you mentioned a name brand PSU, but don't EVER swap out a Dell PSU for another one (unless it's Dell compatible, and I know of only 1 PSU seller that's supposedly compatible.) Dell's have a proprietary PSU/motherboard setup.

Well, here's another thought- you have a soundcard in slot 1? If so, Uninstall the drivers via device manager, and pull the card. I've run into instances where having the sound card in slot 1 (or corrupted drivers) screw things up. Since you reformatted, I wont get into the corrupted profile thing. Try this for the hell of it (I've been through about 20 burners over the last 7 yrs. and kinda seen it all)- disable dma, reboot, try the burner. Nothing happens? Renable dma, reboot, try again. It just may automagically work. It the meantime, you may as well call Sony tech support about getting an rma #. Sorry couldn't be of more help.

ares- will get back to you later. Son has a ballgame. Be back after 8 pm EST. But an 80 conductor cable still only has 40 pins. Doesn't make any difference where you have the drives connected. The jumper pins will determine master/slave, unless you use CS (cable select.)

PS to Ugly- another idea. Imapi is turned on by default afer an install. Try STOPPING this service, as it sometimes interferes with 3rd party software like Nero. Also turn off Universal Plug and Play- that's a security risk on your system, and I've run into hardware problems early on when I first got XP. Oh, yeah, another thought, but a stretch...When you reinstalled XP, did you create a new user profile? You should NEVER work off the Administrator profile, as that's for troubleshooting purposes. Also, did you install InCd AND DLA? Get rid of one of them. The Sony's don't like 2 types of packet writing software. Another stretch...do an sfc /scannow to refresh the native Windows files. If you're using a siberian copy of Nero, there's no telling what you could have infected your system with. Not talking down to you, so don't take it that way. Just throwing out every possible idea I've personally tried. Just hoping that if I throw enough shit out, something will stick.
ANOTHER thought- you know what cured MY problem when nothing was working? I reinstalled the 4 in 1 drivers. I know you tried that already, but I did it a coupla times, and it finally stuck! Also, you might want to check Windows update to see if there's some new chipset driver or something. Good luck.
Another PS to both you and ares: have you tried a totally new 80 condutor cable?
_X_X_X_X_X_[small]Sil[/small]

 

[bold]

1. Shouldn't be any problems. On my primary channel, I have 1 250 gig HD and 1 80 gigger. For awhile, the 80 was the master; then I simply rejumpered the drives to make the 250 the master w/out changing connectors.

2. Ideally, I'd prefer to have the HDs and optical drives on opposite channels. This way, say I'm making a disk to disk copies, the data is travelling on 2 different highways, so to speak, instead of possibly hitting a bottleneck running on the same path. Is slaving your LG drive to the primary channel an option?

3. What's my setup? My Sony is the slave on the second channel with an LG combo cd burner/dvd player. It was impossible for me to slave the burner/dvd player to the primary channel and slave the 80 gig HD to the second channel; box just too tight. So this is proof that the Sony doesn't HAVE to be the master as Sony tech claimed when I called (yeah, Sony, your techs suck big time!)

[bold]

I know I sound like a broken record, but what's your power supply? When new hardware is added and then when things start acting flaky, I almost always ask what the PSU is first. Check for spyware, do an online virus scan, update BIOS? How much ram do you have? I say when running XP, you need minimally 512 megs for things to run smoothly. Did you add any new software, then the problem happened? Maybe a system restore to when things were working can fix it.

Did you try playing the DVD back with the bundled PowerDVD? I had my own copy of PDVD and *nothing* would playback. Using the bundled copy fixed that.

fwiw, here's the specs on my home-made system:
Asus A7V8X-X mobo- budget board but stable.
Athlon 2000+ XP chip
512 Crucial ddr ram running @ 266 FSB
Audigy SoundBlaster with internal box in drive bay
Leadtek ti4200 128 MB ddr memory
Leadtek XP Deluxe tv tuner card
1 250 Western Digital HD w/8 meg cache w/a HD cooler attached (hate HEAT in my box!)
1 80 gig WD w/2 meg cache
1 80 gig external drive in external bay connected by usb
5.1 Logitech speakers.

And I have a lower end home-made system and about 5 computers in my bedroom, lol. Have 3 computers (1 laptop) networked sharing broadband. Everything's is working fine. I only have problems with the Sony when I use cheap media, but I've found after making a number of coasters using cheapia media, is lower the burn rate to 2.4 or whatever the number is lower than 4. I'm fanatical about running spybot search and destroy, Ad-aware, keeping my virus prog up to date, and doing an online scan at pandasoftware.com.

Anyway, hope something works for you.

 

I have had this drive for some time now and have tried many different things and never had a problem with it

I'm a Computer Technician
running
OS: Windows 2003 Enterprise server
Burner: DRU-530A
2.5 Gigahertz P4 not celeron
serial drive 80 gig

Here is what I have found so far
I burned this thing hard core day after day DVD
CD didn't matter left all the crap running DMA PIO
Auto detect ect.

The time when this thing went south is when I had
RecordNow MAX and went to do a burn to next track
or new volume because I noticed a Problem with
adding data to a open track on a CDR that was burned
in open track mode......
then after a couple failures and such I noticed I had spyware so I cleaned that out and still noticed something funky... Took the drive out put it in a clean system and found that the drive was not the problem at all but when i put the drive back into my system
It went working again but I also noticed that I was
working with a different registry
Etrust Antivrus locked up the system hard core
CPu 100% can't do nothing but reboot
I came up after reboot and instantly realized that
I could not read anything in the drive again
but there were no errors in device manager or anything
but I new I was running a different registry because of
the sluggish performance again
and have routed this problem down to
Something going corrupt and or a setting in the registry
getting fouled up------ 07/25/04

Another Anomaly noticed
there seems to be other software that might have screwed up the registry and took my friggen DVDrom settings and or drivers with it.
I will be back with how I fixed my problem

Have burned DVD MP3 Audio CDROMS and all worked perfect
till I went an did the open disk add information to it
now I get a signal light that recognizes the rom
and signifies it is there but windows does not show the
contents and across the network the drive reads not ready.

will be back with more information


Somehow something tells me there is a setting somewhere in the registry and what I have read in the forums is that there must be a registry setting that gets screwed up along the way

because from the previous posts i noticed how these people where fixing the problem
but in reality windows was changing the registry settings for them and this would fix the problem for them

 

I have done a registry modification
to certin areas

I backed up the registry areas before forceing windows to rewrite the areas in Currnet control set
Current Control Set
in this area I whiped out the PCIIDE folder
and the IDE folder to make windows rewrite the registry data as if was just installed

rebooted eveything went ok and worked better
but still nothing could be seen on the drive so then I went to
http://sony.storagesupport.com/dvdrw/dru530adwn.htm#dwns
and Got the Diagnostic tool ran that it failed to even read a blank disk
then i noticed it had Firmaware version 1.0d
So I downloaded that and updated it as well to version 2.1a which was the latest on the website
It went ok and still got nothing back on the drive so far

 

So everything is working now, rainman? Just an FYI; this is from the readme file in RecordNow!:

"6. Possible DVD Data Loss with Windows 2000/XP
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sonic RecordNow! allows you to make multiple recordings
to a single DVD. However, a serious problem can occur on
Windows 2000 and XP systems once the total amount of data or music
recorded during multiple jobs exceeds 4 GB. Once the total amount
of data or music exceeds 4 GB, only the first recording job placed
on the disc will be visible to your computer. This problem does not
affect single recording jobs larger than 4 GB.

Microsoft has been working to fix this problem. For more information,
please visit the Microsoft support center at
http://support.microsoft.com and search for document Q329112."

So maybe the problem was only because you you tried to burn again?

 

-----7:10 am July 26th 2004
Yes this all started when I went for the reburn
or Reburn and add data to an already written rom
this is when the Sony DVD/CD went south
I tried to add data to an already written rom
to add data using last track and track at once
and when I tried the fricken volume it tried and falied but didn't give a failure but it never wrote data on the rom. The 2nd time i tried to do the new Volume it rewrote the whole
F#$% ing rom....... in open mode when it should have just added the data and made a new volume addition to the rom like the software says it does

There has never been data loss or anything like that

But somthing did happen to cause a chain of events
and I think it's a file or virus or somthing that has
locked it self in and screwed things up but I can't
get a scanner to pick up anything unusal

But we are noticing other wierd things
like VMware when booting off of an ISO it
now says
*** VMware Workstation internal monitor error ***
VM attempting to execute in undefined memory.

I noticed some other things that have gone corrupt as
well and some weird Hard drive activity

This could be either hardware or software
But My friend who's a Advanced Certified Electronics
Technician told me to try some things ,but I won't do that untill I know this is either software or not
SOooo Time to do software uninstalls and the like

I noticed alot of data loss or seemingly simple files
and or programs that have gone way south because of
some fricken wanomaly and the thing keeps comming
back after uninstalls and reinstalls of actuall programms time to test alot of antivirus and other things and bring the system down to hardly any software installed except drivers

The Idea is to strip the system down of all software
and test the CDROM from dvd and cd reads then writes
or can even be seen after each reboot

But first I will do the PIO and DMA check to see if I can even see it.

-----7:10 am July 26th 2004

 

I read earlier in this thread that you had scanned your system for mal-ware. Have you tried running Ad-Aware AND SpyBot? I strongly recommend running both of them BEFORE uninstalling any software -- they may help you identify which software package, if any, is introducing your current problem(s). Just a suggestion. Good luck!