I was busily backing up my DVD movies two days ago. I left my fileserver to encode and burn the DVD for me and went to take a shower. I came back about an hour later (the shower wasn’t that long), and noticed that the DVD burner tray was open, but there was no disc in the tray.
I must have forgotten to load a disc, I thought to myself. I put in another dual-layer disc and tried to close the tray.
The tray went about halfway in and then spat the disc back out. Weird. I pushed the tray in again, out the disc came.
I squinted into the drive and noticed a piece of white foam was sticking up where it probably shouldn’t be. Maybe the disc got too hot and got stuck in the drive? I grumbled and shut my fileserver off. I pulled the DVD burner out and unscrewed it, giggling at the “BREAKING SEAL VOIDS WARRANTY” sticker on the bottom.
Sure enough, there was a DVD trapped inside, along with the white foam disc (presumably to cushion the laser head) and a black rubber band that is probably used to connect the drive opening/closing gears.
I dug the DVD out and it was scratched more than my back during the heat of passion:
I thought about trying to reattach the foam disc and the rubber band, but the disc looked pretty jacked. I also figured that if my drive broke down under normal conditions, I was sure it would fail again with already tweaked parts. I took these pics for posterity and then junked the drive.
Luckily, the replacement drive is about 1/3 the cost of the original. I also needed an excuse to buy a 16-port switch and some CAT5 cable from the fine folks at Newegg.com. Hopefully my replacement gear will arrive by Wednesday this week.
Sorry about your drive. Glad it didn’t burn your house down. I’ve seen a CDROM start a fire.
Have you noticed the similarity between the “white foam disc” you found inside your drive and those “foam discs” used on CD-R and DVD containers? (The spindle type. These often have a foam “washer” at the top.)
I think that one of these probably got into your drive on top of a new disc, jammed the mechanism and the “drive belt” (that little rubber band you found) popped off the drive motor, probably before the motor burnt out, thus keeping it alive.
I know all this because the very same thing happened to me at the start of this week. I confirmed that the foam “washer” was not part of the mechanism with a quick e-mail to the manufacturers tech support and now the drive is working perfectly well again.
Hi somethingbrite, welcome to Gibberish!
You are most likely correct. My drive is long gone, but perhaps its injury wasn’t fatal after all. I am glad you were able to recover your drive. :)