burnt a DVD on my laptop for the first time the other day using Nero. Dead easy so tried to burn another one last night. Left it to run last night as it takes a while and when i looked this morning it said the burn failed but strangely the DVD-RW drive was completly dead and did not seem to have any power going to it and couldnt eject the dvd without the pin in the hole method. Any idea what i have done? have i blown the DVD drive or something else? I have removed the drive and found a replacement on ebay for £40 (panasonic UJ-840) but I wouldnt want to get it and find out that it isnt the problem...........any ideas?

drive prolly went under some stress and to be honest with a mediocre setup it should not take more than 20mins, take a look at http://www.novatech.co.uk I used to work there they have fairly cheap IDE DVD writers for sale. thin ya looking about 16+ so sod that 40 one lol.

burnt a DVD on my laptop for the first time the other day using Nero. Dead easy so tried to burn another one last night. Left it to run last night as it takes a while and when i looked this morning it said the burn failed but strangely the DVD-RW drive was completly dead and did not seem to have any power going to it and couldnt eject the dvd without the pin in the hole method. Any idea what i have done? have i blown the DVD drive or something else? I have removed the drive and found a replacement on ebay for £40 (panasonic UJ-840) but I wouldnt want to get it and find out that it isnt the problem...........any ideas?

I would see if there are updated drivers for your drive first. You can check on your drive manufacturers website AND on your laptop manufactures website for the latest drivers.

 

Check the event viewer (click start\run and then type in eventvwr) then check both the system and appilcation logs to see if you get a specifiv error as to why it failed.

 

Any red warning marks in your eventvwr should be investigated.

 

Hope this helps

It sounds like the drive has failed. Best way to tell is to restart the machine and see if it will will eject the tray during startup.

 

Now IIRC nero sometimes flags up "power calibration error" which is basically a retarded way of saying "i cant access the drive properly" and its down to inbuilt windows CD-writing software, so that needs disabling to fix that. I also seem to recall that if you get that error then the drive appears to be locked, you cant eject or read the drive.

 

So to disable inbuilt windows cd writing software, right click on the drive in my computer, go to properties, go to the recording tab and untick "enable cd recording on this drive"

 

But if you cant eject the tray during system startup then its dead, no power, if its a UJ840 in the laptop then go for a direct replacement, bear in mind though that youwillneed all the supporting brackets, bezel and probably an interface converted (laptops never seem to be standard!) from the old drive before you throw it away!