CD burner help?

April 1, 2004 4:01 PM

My CD burner isn't working! Last night, I was burning a few CDs for friends. I successfully finished three, but after that things stopped working. I'm using Nero, and when I try to burn a CD the status just sits at lead-in. My burner sounds like it's spinning up, then slowing down, spinning up, then slowing down, over and over, and its light is not on. [mi]

Tonight, I tried again. I successfully burned a one-track CD (Rick James - Superfreak). Now I'm trying to burn a Strokes album, but I'm having the same problem as before. What happened to my burner?

posted by punishinglemur to Technology (8 answers total)

How old (or how new) is the burner in question? Sounds like the last sputters before hardware death or from a dead-right-out-of-the-box drive.
posted by Danelope at 4:22 PM on April 1, 2004

Response by poster: I've had it for about a year and a half.
posted by punishinglemur at 4:30 PM on April 1, 2004

Response by poster: I successfully burned a CD over dinner, but my luck doesn't seem to be lasting - I've been waiting 15 minutes for another CD, and it's not going anywhere. I have noticed, though, that my hard drive light is solid-on while this is happening.
posted by punishinglemur at 4:49 PM on April 1, 2004

Response by poster: I managed to successfully cancel a burn that hung on Lead-In. It took about 10 minutes, but eventually the drive stopped spinning and I was able to get out of the Nero burn dialog. Before I closed it, though, I noticed an entry complaining about the "Program Memory Area." Could this have anything to do with my problem?
posted by punishinglemur at 5:34 PM on April 1, 2004

Sounds like the drive is dying to me.
posted by rhapsodie at 5:42 PM on April 1, 2004

I have a similar problem with a Que!Fire burner. Oddly enough, it works fine on a Mac with CD Roast and Toast (Roxio bundled version), never for the Windows built-in, sometimes for Nero. Go figure.
posted by plinth at 7:09 PM on April 1, 2004

I had a similar thing happen a few years ago when I mistakenly bought a pack of "bargain" no-name CDRs. So make sure you're using "name-brand" media. If not, that could be the culprit rather than the CDR. The PMA error message also could indicate a problem with the media itself.
Also - this may be obvious - but make sure you have the latest drivers for your CDR and the latest Nero updates for your version.
posted by sixdifferentways at 1:28 PM on April 2, 2004

I take you don't have a spare burner or a friend burner to try ? If a new one works consistenly at least you'd learn you need a new burner if you want to quickly end the pain ; to really understand what's going on one 'd need to debug the messages sent by the burner to software and vice versa..in other words serious geek work you may not like to mess with.

So my $1 : try another burner if avaiable for free
posted by elpapacito at 5:25 AM on April 3, 2004