Hello everyone,

I find what happened to me strange, but still I was hoping someone can share some light on the subject. I have a TEAC 552E CD writer (the firmware I was using at the time was 1.09), and I tried to make a backup of my Sims 2 CD (first CD contains securom protection, as you all probably know). I managed to make a working Image (I could mount it with Alcohol 120% and play) but when I tried to write it on an empty CD (4x speed, DOA PW write mode) my DVD-ROM would read the CD but the game would crash because the protection detection didn't work. Fine, try again I say, so I put another empty CDR in my drive and to my surprise, my TEAC refuses to read the disc (detect it as an empty CDR). I put in seccond empty CDR in the drive, same thing. It spins it up slowly, makes strange hissing noises as if the disc would be damaged, and refuses to read it.

The empty CDRs are TRAXDATA 80 min discs. I bought 50 of them in a pack and so far used/burned around 25 of them with no problem. Now I can basically give the rest of them away because my TEAC refuses to read them.

I also tried putting in some Verbatim and some cheap Philips CDRs, and the CDRW reads them fine. After that I've updated the Firmware on my TAEC (to 1.14), but still no go. I know it's not a ATAPI issue because the CDRW fails to recognize/read the empty TRAXDATA CDRs even while the system is booting up.

On top of it all, the CDRW drive refuses to read my failed attempts to make a backup disk of Sims 2, even though my DVD-ROM reads them.

I'm out shopping for a new DVD writer anyway, so it's not such a big loss, but it does scare me to try to make a backup with it, once I purchase it, based on what happened to my TEAC.

Oh, and yes the TRAXDATA empty CDRs I'm talking about work fine with the computer I have at work (LG CDRW).

So any ideas what happened and if there's a way to fix it (i'm guessing there isn't...)?

Hm, well I'm pretty sure my drive is FUBAR. I just burned a simple CDRW and I'm getting CRC errors trying to copy the data back from it.

Guess RAW writing isn't so innocent.