ok, here's the deal, about 3 weeks ago i bought a cheapo dvd-burner from fry's. it was a BTC 8x ±R, 4x ±RW for $60 (no rebate required). i didn't actually put it in my machine til about a week ago. also, at the same time i bought the burner, i bought a 50-spindle of the fry's brand (Great Quality) 4x DVD-Rs for $24.50. my intention was to use them to back up my xbox games library. i have 115 xbox games. anyways, with that BTC burner and those cheapie dvd-rs, i had hardly any trouble at all. i successfuly backed up 22 games with only 3 coasters. 2 of the coasters were due to a problem with the drive locing up during the finalization process, the other one was just a bad burn i guess, as it would play the disc just fine but would lock up during the creation of a profile. i tried burning that game again and it worked fine the 2nd time. now, about the problem. very shortly after i installed the drive, a friend of mine pointed out to me that newegg.com had the lite-on 832S dual layer burner for only $79. i am an avid lite-on fan (i already had a lite-on dvd-rom drive and a lite-on cd-rw 48125W in my PC for quite some time now). so what i did was take the BTC out and returned it to fry's, then when i got home from successfully returning it i immediately ordered the lite-on from newegg (which had subsequently already risen in price to $85). well this lite-on, the one that i wanted so bad from the brand i trust so much, arrived yesterday. when i got home last night i was more than happy to install it and start playing with it. the first thing i did was burn a demo (that my neighbor brought over) onto one of the 5 free DVD-Rs that newegg sent with the lite-on. the main purpose of that was just to find out what speed those DVD-Rs were since it didn't say on them anywhere. well, the demo worked fine and all, so i set back to the task at hand, backing up the rest of my xbox collection. this is where the problem started. of course, i went back to using those 4x's that i got from fry's. i already had made iso's of 4 games that were ready to burn. i burned the first iso with the nero 6 express (that came with the lite-on) and put it in the box. nada. i thought maybe it was a bad iso (Dead To Rights), so i tried the next iso (Otogi). same thing. i thought it might be the software, so i switched to RecordNowMax and tried that one again. same thing. the box would not read them, not even if i went into boxplorer to look at the disc, which makes me think they weren't getting finalized somehow. at this point i went to lite-on's website and dl'ed the latest firmware and installed it. that took it from V04 to V08. then i tried the same iso again with the same software. same thing. i was thinking that, for some reason, the lite-on was not finalizing the discs (even though every one of them said 'burned successfully'), but then i realized that the demo i burned at first with the newegg media worked just fine. so then i tried the same iso with that media, but this time i used alcohol 120% to burn it. well, it worked just fine in the xbox. so then i tried the fry's media again with the first iso and alcohol 120%. did not self-boot, but this one was the first one that was actually readable by boxplorer. at this point it was really late and i was very aggravated so i went to bed. i do not know if that last disc would actually play by selected the default.xbe in boxplorer, all i know is that i could browse to it and see all the files listed on it, which i was not able to do with any of the other discs of this media type. i still have about 20 discs left from that spindle and i guess what i need to know is: is there a way to get the lite-on to burn with this media or am i going to have to return it and go get another BTC burner? i really wanted to keep this lite-on because of the dual-layer capability, but if it is going to be this picky with media, i don't know if it is worth it.
I have 2 lite on dvd burners, one of which is the same as yours. I have not had a single problem with either lite on burner and have not had to update the firmware either. As for media i use cheap princo 4x 'a' grade and i have had very few coasters. It may be the burner, its hard to say. If the iso is exactly the same (as you have used previously) and the media is the same then i dont see how it fails to work. Can you try to backup a movie and see if that plays in your dvd player and then in your xbox?? The burner may be damaged, see how the movies go and take it from there. One last thing, the nero that came with that burner works fine with my xbox games (burning dvd - image) and record now max and dx both work also. The only thing is that my new copy of nero (same as above) wont back up my ps2 games, so i used alcohol 120 instead. Well i dont know how much of a help this will be, but best of luck in finding a solution. clarky
hey, thanks for the reply. i did alot of researching on this subject yesterday. i started here and when no one answered and i couldn't find anything using the search function or browsing the forums, i went over to xbox-scene. i tried searching there and after working with the wording of the search, i finally got 2 results, one of which led me to a site called cdfreaks.com. that site is totally awesome, btw. they have a lite-on forum(http://club.cdfreaks.com/forumdisplay.php?f=44) and stickied up at the top of the lite-on forum was a thread named "What DVD media should I use with my LiteOn DVD burner?". in that topic, it specifically says: "LiteOn drives do not perform well with "cheap" ("junk") media. Media types such as Princo, AML, AN3-, Longten, Infosmart, Lead Data, etc., are generally considered to be junk media and should be avoided. In the long run, they are actually pretty "expensive" because even if they do burn well, these media types tend to be so poorly manufactured that their dyes have been known to degrade just months after being burned. Many generic-branded media types (e.g., HQ, GQ, Sonic, Matrix, etc.) fall into this category. If you want low-cost media, there are much better alternatives like Prodisc and RiTEK. Mainstream media generally works fine with LiteOn drives." the ones in bold above is what i have. the manufacturer is lead data and the brand on the dvds is gq but all was not lost, not yet. for this site has tonz of great and awesome and magnificent information for us lite-on peeps. you see, some of the members there have developed a program called OmniPatcher. it is a program written specifically for editing (a.k.a. tweaking) lite-on firmware to get it working better with each individual's specific needs. it's pretty damn sweet. i found in this thread(http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?t=97590&page=4) a post by a guy who bought a 250-count bulkpaq of el cheapo DVD-Rs and was having some real trouble with them. seems that he usually got princo DVD-Rs when he ordered those bulkpaqs, but this time he got a new media that didn't even have an entry for it's descriptor in the lite-on firmware. in that same thread, one of the the developer's of the omnipatcher replied and, after getting the descriptor from him, made him a personal version of omnipatcher with that descriptor in it (he had to overwrite an existing descriptor to do it). well, they guy played around with it trying to find the best settings for his media and he posted his results in this thread(http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?t=104064). last night i dl'ed the omnipatcher and kprobe and dvdinfopro utilities so i could try some stuff on my problem. i used dvdinfopro to find out who was the manufacturer of my discs and what the media descriptor was for them. that's when i found out the manufacturer was lead data. the media descriptor was leaddata01 or someting like that. turns out the lite-on firmware already has an entry for that descriptor and omnipatcher had no recommended tweaks for that media type. so i tried using the settings the guy with the bulkpaq used and it worked. i only burned one disc, it was burnout 2, but it worked. i then scanned the disc with kprobe and the results were pretty bad. actually, i should say REALLY bad. but it worked and that alone was better than before. i played a couple of rounds of crash mode on level 15 with it and no problems whatsoever. i am debating whether i should play around with the settings to get a better burn or just be happy with it like it is. i hope this helps anyone else out there that has the same trouble as me. tonight i am going to try backing up some movies onto some GQ DVD+Rs i have and see how that goes.
