HP DVD drive problem

The Lightscribe DVD drive on my HP Pavillion DV5000z has worked fine
for months (although I've given it pretty heavy use, burning about 70
DVDs) . Then it developed a sudden problem, soaking up 100% of the
processor running under Windows XP SP2 and taking forever to read or
burn a DVD.

I tried cleaning the DVD drive with a cotton swab and lens cleaner
(new at this, though). This seemed to solve the problem of 100% CPU
usage, but the sound is skippy and has an echo when I play the DVD.
Perhaps the drive is running slow??

Did I not clean the drive properly? Did I misalign the mirror or leds
or something? Do I need to replace the drive (the part costs
$260!) ???

Thanks for any help / advice / insight :-)

Phillip

On the seventh day, wrote...

> The Lightscribe DVD drive on my HP Pavillion DV5000z has worked fine
> for months (although I've given it pretty heavy use, burning about 70
> DVDs) . Then it developed a sudden problem, soaking up 100% of the
> processor running under Windows XP SP2 and taking forever to read or
> burn a DVD.
>
> I tried cleaning the DVD drive with a cotton swab and lens cleaner
> (new at this, though). This seemed to solve the problem of 100% CPU
> usage, but the sound is skippy and has an echo when I play the DVD.
> Perhaps the drive is running slow??
>
> Did I not clean the drive properly? Did I misalign the mirror or leds
> or something? Do I need to replace the drive (the part costs
> $260!) ???
>
> Thanks for any help / advice / insight :-)

It's certainly possible that you've misaligned the optic device inside the
drive but given my experiences, that's highly unlikely today. I'd rather
suggest that you may have a problem with DMA usage and/or a software error.
The latter can be solved with a clean install or a recovery installation
using the media HP provided (or which you backed up during install), the
latter can be solved by simply enable DMA mode: log in as Administrator or
whatever user has administrative priviledges, click Start, point at My
computer, right-click, choose manage, in the left hand pane choose Device
Manager, click on IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers in the right hand pane, for
both Primary and Secondary IDE channel double-click and go into their resp.
properties. Choose register card Advanced settings. Click on "Use DMA if
possible" in the dropdown listbox. Click on OK. You need to reboot. Check
back that Windows is indeed reporting DMA for all devices on both channels.
If DMA doesn't stay on, you most likely have a software issue at hand and
can still solve it through reinstalling Windows.

If you want to replace the drive - though I personally think it hasn't
failed - you can buy whatever drive you want. There are lightscribe drives
available for as little as 50$ US. Even the original HP drives cost less
than 260 if you buy them through retail.

HTH

--
mit freundlichen Grüßen/with kind regards
Christian Dürrhauer

In the beginning, the universe was created. This made a lot of people very
angry, and has been widely regarded as a bad idea.
Douglas Adam