looking for tips on how to go about replacing a goosed dvd writer, any visual aid would be grateful, eg opening up the hard drive and basicly knowing what to do, cheers.
The title of your thread states DVD writer and your initial post indicates dvd writer and hard drive. Which is it you are wanting to replace?
1.) One does not open up their "hard drive". You open up the "tower" or "case" 2.) As far as I know, Maxtor does not make dvd writers. They make Hard Drives. So what is it that you need replaced... a dvd writer or hard drive?
Pretty straight forward for what you want to do, one assumes you have a reinstall disk of the OS you want to use,once you have the side off the comp & possibly removed the front panel (some comps have bays inside that allow sideways removal so no need to take off front panel)ok if you have a SATA drive there's only one place the wires can go,however if it's IDE get a pen & paper a draw where they connect on the hdd,while the new hdd is out in the open attach the little plastic pin joiner to set master or slave or if in doubt use cable select or cs then attach wires to new hdd ,the diag on the new hdd will help as it will be different from the old hdd for pin setting of master or cs
basicly guys i am totally new to this, i have recently put movies on to disc no problem but now the tray totally rejects any blank disc saying open and install blank disc. I have got to assume its goosed although diagnostics say its in working order.. It also will not play any pre-recorded dvd.
Me thinks he is misreading the drive in the hardware tab, the model listed on the maxtor homepage doesn't exist, but the model # 6B250S0 is a 250 Gigabyte SATA drive, Diamondmax 10 type. http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.j..._product&pageno=2&interfaces=&reqPage=Support He is trying to replave a CD/DVD burner unit I believe. Just follow the quick start instructions with the unit, make sure the jumpers on the back are set the same as the unit you just took out, example cable select or master.
newegg.com start there, look at CincyRob's excellent forum on Nero burning quality scans to give you an idea of burner/media combinations available. http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_jump.cfm/540688/4513685-475495
Don't pull the drive just yet. [bold]tray totally rejects any blank disc saying open and install blank disc. I have got to assume its goosed although diagnostics say its in working order.. It also will not play any pre-recorded dvd. [/bold] Will it play an original dvd? Or CDs? I have yet to see a drive go bad after 1000's of backups. The main problem I did encounter is sometimes dvd-rw drives get lost.Happened a couple times on me. Go into Device manager under CDrom/Dvd-rw drives. Locate that burner in the tree,uninstall drivers,reboot.Upon rebooting,XP should hook the correct drivers automatically. It definitely won't hurt any. If it's just rejecting blank media-but plays original dvds,probably needs a firmware update,especially if you just switched to a different speed or brand of blank media. Post back the brand name/model #/and current firmware version of your dvd-rw drive.This free program will give the answers to that info: http://www.afterdawn.com/software/video_software/dvd-r_tools/dvd_identifier.cfm
