Re: DVD writer has stopped reading/writing CD's

Mike Paff wrote:
Different frequencies of light are needed to read/write CDs and DVDs.
Your drive probably uses two different lasers to to produce the two
different frequencies and the one used for CDs has died.

If your drive uses only one laser, then the associated circuit
that changes the light frequency has broken.

DVD writers are fairly cheap nowadays, so it's likely not worth
the time to try and fix.

To fill in some additional detail, I recall that this kind of thing happened to me once before, and I'm not sure if it happened on this same drive or the other one. The solution turned out to be a complete Windows XP reinstall from scratch. Have no idea why this would help, but I didn't have Linux running previously so I don't know if it was exactly the same problem.

Do you think perhaps the proximity of these two drives (one is sitting right over top of the other) might affect this? Perhaps one drive starts to overheat due to the activity of the other?
.

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