Optical drive problems

My brother's been having a lot of problems with programs that use the optical drive in his new PC.

I installed a variety of programs to cover the tasks he does, including BurnAware Free. I just observed over Teamviewer that this locks up and it was impossible to kill, either via the TaskManager, taskkill or Process Hacker. It had two programs running, AudioCD.exe and MP3Disc.exe, neither of which I could kill, even after he ejected the drive (I've found sometimes that programs get locked up whilst trying to access the disc, so removing it can sometimes unfreeze them).

I then tried Ashampoo Burning Studio but that locked up and wouldn't let me kill it either. I can understand it might have been fighting for the drive with BurnAware but I still should have been able to kill them.

He has DVDFabPasskey installed, so I wonder if that needs to be shutdown before running these burning apps?

He says the BurnAware Free also told him his disc was too big (i.e. over 80mins), despite the total time shown only being 79-something minutes and that either that program or Ashampoo said there was a problem verifying after the burn, although he was able to use another program to verify (I'm not sure what he used) and that worked fine.

It may be that these programs are just buggy and as all they all seem to have issues or limitations that made them unsuitable for my brother's needs, he's now just using Nero v8 micro for his burning tasks, so let's forget about those programs, other than DVDFabPasskey which he still uses for ripping.

He ripped a DVD the other day and said it seemed to be slower than on his old Pentium 3 900Mhz PC with IDE optical drive and it also had an error in the rip which he had to correct with FixVTS which he didn't get on his old PC.

Looking at the System Log, I saw a lot of the following:

An error was detected on device \Device\CdRom0 during a paging operation.

and

The device, \Device\CdRom0, has a bad block.

His main HDD is on the separate SATA3 inteface and he has an IDE HDD on that. The optical drive is currently the only device on the SATA2 ports, apart from the lead to the SATA port on the front panel (which doesn't have any devices connected to it).

I got him to buy a replacement, better quality, SATA cable but he tells me that after replacing it, the first burn he did threw up a verify error, although he said it's been OK since. He's using decent quality Verbatim DVD's, so that's not the issue.

I checked the log and still see these errors

An error was detected on device \Device\CdRom0 during a paging operation.

although the errors after 28/11 refer to CdRom3 instead, so I presume it just changed the number when he replaced the lead for some reason.

I could buy him a new optical drive for Christmas if those errors point to the drive being faulty but I obviously don't want to do that if there's nothing wrong with it and the fault is elsewhere, so a new drive won't help.

Hi ICit2lol

No, I'm sure my brother would have mentioned if it was making any strange noises. I'll have to check whether he's got a disc cleaner or at least one that suitable for writers, as I seem to recall you have to be more careful when cleaning those but I could be wrong about that.

I'm not sure what you mean by "the sheer number of programs that he is using not just ones that use a disk". All the ones I mentioned are disk burning/ripping programs. I installed those when I setup his PC for him to try and avoid having to install Nero, which has become very bloated but as it turned out, those alternative programs were no good and I found Nero v8 micro, so he's not going to be using most of those other programs anymore and I'll uninstall them when I get a chance but I doubt they're causing the errors I'm seeing in the log as they're not running.

The PC was definitely malware-free when I sent it to him and I doubt he's managed to pick up any malware in the couple of months he's had it, as he hasn't installed any software and Avast and Sandboxie are protecting him from web-based infections but I'll double-check to be sure.