On Mon, 03 Aug 2020 11:03:34 -0400, legg wrote:

Two most regularly used optical drives recently stopped
recognizing data DVD's that were created on these machines.
There is no issue with CD media. The affected machines
still recognize commercial 'film' DVDs from the public library.

When attempting to recognize the media, the OS seems to
completely bog down as explorer attempts to display the
drive contents.

Once in a blue moon, explorer succeeds in displaying the
inserted disk, or even a directory on the disk - but
further attempts to access the drive result in explorer
crashing.

Nero infotool and CDroller will also sometimes report
presence and type of DVD - succesive running of tests
usually report empty drives.

After disassembling and cleaning one drive, it allowed
normal operation for a few minutes, but reverted to
previous state after disk ejection and re-insertion.

They are both HT-LG brands, but are located in completely
different PCs (PC-Chips homebrew and Lenovo ThinkCentre
refurb), with different OS (W2K - W7pro)and different
interconnection (IDE and SATA).

The Sony, TDK, Philips, Maxell DVD-R media , both blank
and previously written, are recognizable on two other,
less-frequently used machines in the lab, neither having
HT-LG hardware.

Replacing the drives with similar types did not correct
the problem.Replacement drives had other issues, which
is why they were hanging around - sticky doors etc, but
included one IDE drive purchased for this repair exercise)

All of the LG drives, original and replacements, have labels
dated before 2010. The other PC's that still recognize the
media have similar dates of manufacture, but are Sony or
Matsu****a branded.

Using the regular suggestions to manipulate the W7 operating
system ( device manager, optical drivers, atapi drivers,
disk management, registry upper/lower limits, sfc etc )
seem to have no effect.

I've not reinstalled Nero, and haven't (recently) reverted
to a Windows restore point.'restoring' didn't work the first
time, so I don't expect it to work a second time. That is a
bit of a rabbit hole.

I have ordered (by snail delivery) some non-LG drive
replacements as a last resort - but am still curious to
know if this is a more widespread issue.

Using DVD media for physical data back-up or transport
doesn't seem to be common these days - but I've had
large USB memory go bad on me lately, too. I also back up
the OS on a USB-connected HDD.

I'm discouraged by this experience with DVD media and
hardware, for data.

RL

A new (2009) DVD R/W had no issues recognizing the old
DVD media. This was a Sony AD-7230S. With 2xHT/LG drives
sitting on the shelf with the same DVD recognition issues,
I changed mfrs with no real reason to do so.

There were a lot of these Sony drives on the market both
new and second-hand, so they're obviously not either rare
or particularly desirable. Seems that we're still cleaning
out warehoused stock from 10yrs ago.

This was the W7 SATA drive failure.

Still waiting for the replacement for the older IDE system.

RL