Thrift store DVD-RW doesn't open or acknowledge presence of disk

[JonHendry]

Picked up a Philips DVD-RW drive at a thrift store today. Probably originally part of a Dell PC.

Hooked it up to my hackintosh and the OS sees it. But the eject button on the front doesn't do anything, and if I manage to get a disk into it, the drive doesn't seem to acknowledge the disk's presence. In other words, if I put in a blank CD and try to burn a playlist in iTunes, iTunes keeps saying "insert a blank disk".

Is this worth trying to repair? Anyone have any suggestions as to how to troubleshoot it?

PHILIPS DVD+RW DVD8601:

  Firmware Revision:   KD10
  Interconnect:   ATAPI
  Burn Support:   Yes (Generic Drive Support)
  Profile Path:   None
  Cache:   2048 KB
  Reads DVD:   Yes
  CD-Write:   -R, -RW
  DVD-Write:   -R, -RW, +R, +R DL, +RW
  Write Strategies:   CD-TAO, CD-SAO, CD-Raw, DVD-DAO
  Media:   To show the available burn speeds, insert a disc and choose File > Refresh Information

[Mr. Scram]

Worth in the economic sense? A new one goes for as little as $10, so not quite.

[Alex Eisenhut]

Clean the lens. Often overlooked.

[coromonadalix]

An clean up can do,   the laser beam is trying to do an focus "ok" check .... it check the cd presence to do its job.

Sony had tons of problems in cd players, the suspension lens was made in plastic, over time the lens would simply fall down and make the drive circuit unable to do its job.

But for check you need an scope with calibration disk, sometimes it worked fine with an ordinary disk.

Since the price of theses unit is very low, toss it away and put an new on instead.

[james_s]

Is there something special about this particular drive? If not then I would just buy a new one, they are insanely cheap. Before you chuck the dead one though you might pull the laser diode out, many of these are surprisingly powerful. Orders of magnitude more than the standard laser pointers.

I won't lecture you on the potential safety issues regarding lasers, there is plenty of info on that online.