Hi.
I have a Quanta PL-5C laptop which is marketed in India by the brand name Zenith. It has 2 GB RAM and earlier this laptop used to run on preinstalled Windows Vista Starter Edition and has a Optiarc DVD-RW AD-7530B drive but now it runs on Windows XP Professional Edition. My problem with the DVD-RW Drive started as follows:
One day I wanted to write some data on a brand new & blank CD-RW disk. When I inserted the disk in the drive the OS sought to format it but I changed my mind about it and aborted the process and neither the disk's format process could initiate or could complete itself ( to tell you all, the truth, I don't really remember which was the case ) nor any data was written to the disk and I removed it from the drive. At that time I did not know that there was something wrong with the drive.
After sometime I again decided to write some data on the same CD-RW disk but when I inserted it in to the drive, the computer did not recognize it as a blank disk but instead the drive became busy for a very long time i.e. the small LED light on the outside of the drive came on and stayed that way throughout this experience, also I could hear the sound of the disk spinning inside the drive and in explorer window ( named "computer" in Vista ) I could see a small icon in the shape of a round disk that kept on appearing and disappearing intermittently above the tip of the arrow shaped mouse pointer and one last thing that a green bar kept on crawling but could never manage to finish or reach its final destination in the address bar ( where the 'x' shaped button to stop an operation in Vista windows is located ) of the explorer window.
All this happened continuously for quite a long time and my computer also froze during this operation i.e. when I tried to stop the drive from trying to read / recognize the blank disk by clicking on the 'x' shaped stop button in the explorer window or close the window altogether, nothing happened. I could regain back the control of my PC only by hitting the physical eject button located on the outside of the drive tray multiple times. Then the tray ejected and I removed the disk from the drive and closed the tray. As soon as I removed the disk my PC unfroze and I could resume its normal operation.
After this incident I thought that the problem had been caused by the disk I had used so I tried to write data on another brand new disk but the result was the same i.e. all the things that I have previously described repeated themselves and I was very much perplexed by this. Now whenever I try to write data on a blank disk ( be it CD-R or CD-RW or a brand new or an old one ), my PC's drive does not recognize it and behaves in the same way as previously described although it still is able to read from disks that I had burned before this incident about the aborted formatting operation as well as other commercially available disks which contain prewritten data upon them such as games, songs, software etc.
A friend suggested that replacing my OS from Vista to XP might solve the problem so I did this and installed XP in the place of Vista ( and yes! the drive did read from the XP installation disk ) but even after doing this my previous problem with the drive remained as it was when I had Vista running on my PC and in addition to this problem a new one presented itself to me. This problem is that XP recognizes my DVD_RW Drive as a DVD-RAM Drive.
I wish to inform all of you that before this incident I had successfully burned data many times and on many and different types of disks such as CD-R's / CD-RW's etc. & that too in this particular drive itself but since these problems arose I can't do it any more and because of these problems I have become very desperate and don't know what to do? Can somebody help me? Please, I request to all of you good people out there to help me and I thank from my heart to every one who at least goes through the description of my problem. I admit that it is not brief but I had to describe my problem in detail in the hope that it would be easy to understand for the kind soul/s who decide/s to at least read the description of my problems and if I fail in my aim to make it easier for the reader / helper then I apologise from the bottom of my heart for the inconvenience it caused to them.
Now I conclude but not without, once again, with a note of deeply felt gratitude. Any help would be greatly appreciated and thanks many times for it.
Thank You All for bearing with me.
