I am having issues with the above drive. I have a PC this drive is not working properly in, so I reformatted the HD & reinstalled WinXP & all my other software. I also updated the firmware on the 810A. The drive is the master and I have a 2nd Sony drive as a slave. If I put in my Norton Ghost cd in the 810A to install the program I get an error saying that the Launcher failed. I assume this is referring to the auto launcher to get the disc to run automatically. I have also tried another CD that has my WinPVR software for my TV tuner and that disc does the same thing. I have DVDFab Decrypter installed and when I put in DVD's it says that the entire DVD couldn't be read and that I should copy only the main movie. I have tried to backup a PS2 game and I get read errors all the time. Now if I put any of these discs in the other DVD drive and try to do the same thing it works fine. I assume that the 810A is having problems reading the discs... So what could be wrong? Is my drive going bad? I noticed it started doing this within the last 3 to 4 weeks. This drive is just over 1 year old...
I reccomend you clean your laser. You can do this two ways.. 1) Buy a laser cleaning disk for your drive 2) Clean the laser manually with a cottun bud dipped in rubbing alcohol of some sort. Don't use water etc. Rub the wetted side of the cotton bud in circles on the laser for 10 secs or so.. now repeat with the dry end, making sure there is no residue left on the laser. If that doesn't work, your laser has died and you need another drive. Or, just continue to use your secondary drive.
Thought I would put an update out here. I reformatted my PC a 2nd time (hard drive issue) and my DVD drive still did not work properly. I hooked it up to another PC and it worked properly. So now I know that my PC was the issue... I put the drive back in the original PC and suddenly it worked properly. Not sure if I just needed to unhook it or what, but now it works.