I purchased a refurbished HP Media Center PC (m7250n) with HP DVD Writer 840b. For a long time I have been noticing issues with certain CD or DVD brands/types. The funniest thing is that I noticed problems with HP CD media first. Anyway, I searched Google on the issue and found that lot of people were having same problems. Some of them called HP support, some of them replaced the drive, some of them did other (funny) things like formatting C: drive, reinstalling Windows, etc. By the way, I use Linux on this machine (currently Ubuntu 7.10) and problem was present both under Linux and Windows.
Symptoms
- Problems recognizing new empty media from some vendors/types.
- "Funny" noises when writing to the media.
- Sometime noisy and slow when reading different media as well.
- Failing to finish DVD or CD projects.
The problem seems to be related to 840b drive itself. I found a post stating that firmware update helps. That is what I did today and helped me, too.
You can go to this HP link. Follow the instructions there. There are options to create bootable floppy or CD. What I did was to download the small (3MB) file, ran it to get CD ISO image for the firmware update, burned that image on a CD, rebooted PC and waited to update the firmware. After that, my 840b drive burned few DVDs and CDs it was reporting errors before. It also seems to be less noisy when creating or opening DVD/CDs.
I hope you find this helpful.
tp0x45
2 comments:
Do you still have the CD image? Because it's impossible to create under Vista :(
I posted a comment on HP site to make the ISO file available for download for Vista users. I do not have a copy anymore.
Vista has many other issues, you may want to switch back to XP if this is any feasible for you. I actually use Ubuntu Linux on this machine for last year or so and it works great.
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