[Flip500]

Hello, i've noticed recently that my optical drive isn't able to read some dvds. A few days ago me and a few other friends received dvds with pictures on them, inserting my disc into my computer left we with an appparently blank disc, my computer sensed the disc but reported that is was blank with nothing written on it. However, i could clearly see that there was stuff written on the disc and my friend tried the disc in his computer and it worked fine, and i tried his disc which also worked fine on his computer and his disc did not work on my computer either. No one else had this problem, all the discs were burnt in the same manner, with the same computer, and on the same media. These were also simple .jpg and .tiff files that could be opened with preview. On top of this i later realized that there was another computer burnt movie-dvd that came up as blank on my computer but played fine with no problems on a regular dvd player. So my question really is what kind of problem do you think this is? What can i do? Would a DVD Lens Cleaner help/work with my computer? I'm using a 15" Macbook Pro running Mac OS X 10.5.4. Thanks.

[ibook_steve]

Are the disks not even mounting on your desktop? Open System Profiler and make sure you still see your drive. Does the drive make any noise when inserting disks?

The drive or the cable to the drive could be dead. It can't hurt to try cleaning the lens.

Steve

[Flip500]

The disks are mounting, but just as a blank waiting to be burnt. And is it okay to use any dvd lens cleaner? I heard it could be dangerous with a slot-loading drive.

[Flip500]

sorry about the double post but it just occurred to me; is it possible that a magnet could have messed with my Optical Drive? Perhaps unaligned the laser slightly? Because the drive really only has problems on the more critical discs (computer burn dvds), also i do have a 'positive ion bracelet' type thing on my right wrist (making it right above the optical drive) that has 2 small 1000 gauss magnets in it. I doubt they're strong enough, but i was wondering it there was a way to check the alignment (and possibly re-align) and somehow do diagnostics on the optical drive? Any other thought and suggestions would be greatly appreciated too, thanks.

[ghporter]

Optical drives are just that-optical. Magnets that could damage the mechanical works of an optical drive would do a lot more than keep a valid disc from being read. Have you restarted your MBP recently? As in have you tried that since this problem cropped up?

[Flip500]

I have restarted it since then, but to be sure I shutdown and reset the PMS, the disc still couldn't be read. I've burnt dvds and cds since too and they've worked fine, occasionally I do get a weird noise like the disc I'm using is scraping against something, I've also had occasional problems getting a "medium write error" while burning dvds in toast. Also, about 20 minutes ago I was burning a cd in iTunes and heard the scraping sounds, the disc stopped spinning, and after about 30 seconds of just sitting like that the disc ejected and I got a "medium write error" from iTunes! Is this "medium" the discs which I'm burning on? Or the level of the burning error? (I've used both my blank Fujifilm CD-Rs and blank Staples DVD+Rs with success). Any more ideas? Thanks.

P.S. I just re-tried burning the CD and it worked fine this time... same type of disc, didn't move the computer either time etc.