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Oh The Pain

I seem to be the poster child for failed hardware. Today, my Pioneer DVD-RW DVR-112D decided to stop writing discs. From what I can tell, though, this has been going on since the day I installed this disc drive.

Pioneer admitted in 2007, just prior to my purchase of the drive, that there are some manufacturing problems with the drive. They shipped the drive because they "did not feel that a use-case existed in which the error would manifest." Well, apparently that was wrong because many a person has experienced problems with these drives.

For the last year, I've noticed that my Windows XP 64-bit has been experiencing random halts that would last for about 5 seconds. During that time, I would grumble and refine my repertoire of colorful expletives.

Today, after installing a SONY DRU-842A as a replacement, I noticed the random halting was gone. The startup time for Windows was back to its super-fast normal self. With the Pioneer in there, sometimes the Windows boot would just pause for about 15 seconds, or longer, before the splash screen, and then resume. With the SONY, it was super-fast again.

Reviewing the Windows EventViewer, I see that the Pioneer cdrom reported "An error was detected on device \Device\CdRom0 during a paging operation." I suppose that would be the first indication that something was awry with the drive. In the EventViewer, though, that is only a warning. The real error that I saw recently was "The device, \Device\CdRom0, has a bad block." That error is a real indication of death for the Pioneer CD drive.

So far I've replaced my CDROM, my motherboard, and my video card. I have a 22 inch Hanns-G HG216 waiting for install as soon as I get some screws that properly seat it into my Neo-Flex bracket. What's next? I suppose there will be a hard drive failure soon, but that's expected, so I run RAID-5 with Western Digital hard drives and a 3Ware controller.

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