I have a Toshiba A30-303 laptop, which some months ago the DVD-RAM combi drive gave up the ghost and is irrevocably damaged, but that's not the problem at hand. In replacement I bought the LG GSA-2166D DVD-RAM combi drive (as it is external and plugs in to a USB port), but recently it refuses to recognise my blank CD-Rs. I have tried two different types of disc to make sure it wasn't the disc type that was the problem and it won't recognise either type.
Also it will not read some of my music collection which is very frustrating as I wish to copy it to the computer to put onto my iPod. A few examples of music CDs not working are "Incubus: S.C.I.E.N.C.E.", "Incubus: Make Yourself" (Disc 2), "Incubus: Light Grenades" and "Incubus: Enjoy Incubus".
I used much of the same artist to try and show that the drive was not being selective over a publisher and its possible DRM technologies, because other CDs of the same artist did work, so there seems to be no pattern over which CDs it chooses to read, but always chooses the same ones each time. I also know that these CDs do actually work because I have used them in another DVD-ROM drive on my PC which is able to read them perfectly as do two hi-fi systems at home.
I have used the drive on two different computers to see if it was the computer that was causing the problem, however each machine runs windows XP and they both run similar software so this test may not be of any merit.
The drive will read blank DVD-Rs from the same company (Infiniti), but when the "Enable CD recording on this drive" is unchecked (from the properties menu), whenever I try and open up explorer to this CD, and error comes up saying "F:\ is not accessible. Incorrect function." Is this normal behaviour?
Finally, also attached to my PC (not the Toshiba A30-303) I have a BenQ CD-RW drive which also will not recognise Blank CD-Rs, but will however read all my music CDs and all data CDs.
I hope you can give me some help, and many thanks to anyone/everyone that can because I'd really like to start backing up my files onto CD again.