I have two Lite-On LTR-52327S internal cd-rw drives, both bought within a month of each other in late 2003. They are first generation drives with an EEPROM chip. One drive was used at home, and one at work. Both drives were upgraded several times without incident to the latest Lite-On firmware, the last time being in January of this year. This February-March, my home (first) drive began having serious trouble reading or writing any of my discs. I brought the work drive home and used it without incident for a few weeks before it too began behaving the same way.

The problem I'm having is after you insert any disc, the drive will spin up really fast, spin back down, and then you can briefly hear the laser mechanism jerk before it repeats this process several times until it finally successfully reads the data off the disc. I can eventually read my data, but I can no longer successfully burn a cdrom or use my cd-rw media.

Can I do anything to repair or restore proper operation to these drives? Thank you.