LiteOn CDRW Problem

[daytona89]

I have a LiteOn 52246S CDRW drive, which I've owned for a year and a half. I should start by saying that the drive has worked in my system before. As of now, it has the following symptoms:

When set to 'boot from CD' in the BIOS, it can read CDROM, CDR and CDRW, and will attempt to boot from them. However, it will *not* spin them up to speed, which means that when I try to boot from a Linux liveCD, for example, it will *eventually* go through several commands, but will not finish booting. The sustained spinup that is necessary is not happening. And this is outside Windows, so I think it's either a hardware/firmware/bios issue... but I may be wrong (I hope!).

In Windows, the drive exhibits the same behavior. It will (eventually) show a list of files stored on a disc, but since it doesn't spin up, it won't read any of them long enough to play a song, copy a file, run an executable, etc.

The Config:

AMD K63-400, 160MB Ram, 60GB hdd.
Drive is on its own IDE channel as master. Tried firmware 6S0D and 6S0F (latest).
Via chipset. Have latest drivers for chipset. Used Via's IDETool to force drive into PI0 mode.

The odd thing is, the drive will attempt to burn CDR (gets about 30% in, but only at very low speeds) and has burned a CDRW (at 2x) successfully.

Is there any likelihood that the IDE cable is gone? It looks okay (no crimps, tears, etc) and I tried the drive in both positions. Nothing helps.

Oh yeah... tried cleaning with lens cleaner. No effect.

Any assistance is appreciated. If the drive has hardware damage, I am open to attempting to repair it, if possible, since it's out of warranty. Are there any books on the subject, or is there a common failure part in Liteon drives?

Thanks very much in advance.

[mjkovis]

Welcome to PC-Mech daytona89!!!

Originally Posted by daytona89 Is there any likelihood that the IDE cable is gone?

Do you have another IDE cable to try? They are super cheap. Other than that I cant think of any other ideas.

AK

[Spaz06]

Originally Posted by Acid-Klutch Welcome to PC-Mech daytona89!!! Do you have another IDE cable to try? They are super cheap. Other than that I cant think of any other ideas. AK

1. Try a new cable as suggested
2. Try the drive in a different system.

I had a problem once, where the power supply was going bad and wasn't supplying enough power to operate an optical drive. So you may have a power supply problem, if you have another system, maybe you can try the power supply out of the other system.

Do these thing one at a time, so you know what fixes the problem and let us know the outcome.

[glc]

Why are you forcing it to PIO? You really want it in DMA.

I don't know of any common failure parts in a Lite-On, but at today's prices, it's not really worth trying to fix it if it's shot. A year and a half of heavy use sounds like about how long a drive lasts.