The Disc Drive Saga

After three months of comedy and agony, the CD/DVD burner on our computer is finally fixed and my husband is happily churning out copies of a home movie to send to his kids. I had nearly given up on ever arriving at this happy ending.

It all a started when I first showed my husband how easy it was to use the computer to burn a copy of a home movie he had converted to a DVD disc. He was impressed and wanted to make more DVD copies. As luck would have it, though, the CD/DVD burner started malfunctioning shortly afterward. I tried updating the Nero burning software at a cost of $69, but to no avail. It was the hardware, and the drive was now incapable of burning, playing, or even recognizing any CD or DVD disc that was placed into it.

Not to worry, though. We had a service contract with Comp USA! I called. The part would be sent directly to our house, and as soon as it arrived, a technician would come out to install it. Naively, I assumed this would take place within a week or two. But when we left on our vacation trip over a month later, the part still hadn’t arrived.

When we returned from vacation, there was a message on our answering machine from Comp USA: please call to set an appointment time. According to Comp USA, the part had been delivered the day before we arrived home. But where was it? UPS left it on our porch, and apparently it had been lost or stolen. A replacement part had to be ordered.

Curiously, it arrived in only two weeks this time, and a technician installed it the next day. Before the technician left, I burned a test CD. It worked, and I was elated. Then I tried to make a disc-to-disc copy of my husband’s home movie DVD. Error message. The technician patiently explained that I couldn’t use a DVD disc in a CD burner. I patiently replied that the part he replaced was supposed to be a DVD burner. That was when we both realized that Comp USA had sent the wrong part!

The technician called Comp USA and reported the error. Comp USA wanted him to remove the new CD burner he had just installed, but he refused, for which I was grateful. At least I could now burn some photo CDs that I’d been waiting to do for a month. Meanwhile, a new part was ordered.

So we were back to square one, again waiting for a delivery. And again, when it arrived about a week later, it was the wrong part, a DVD ROM which, Comp USA admitted, wasn’t going to burn anything. Yet another part was ordered. Would number four be the charm??

Maybe. The right part arrive only a day or two later. We wondered why the first one took over a month. A different technician, a young woman, arrived to install it. This time, I cut right to the chase and tried making a disc-to-disc DVD copy. It appeared to work at first, but the DVD copy would not play. We tried again and again. It was getting late. The technician tried one more time, this time using a longer burning method, and left before it finished. See if it works, see if the discs play in another machine, try a different medium, she said as she headed for the door. If not, maybe the part is bad and we’ll have to order another one!

My husband, to say the least, was not a happy camper, and immediately called Comp USA, demanding that they send someone “that knows what they are doing.” We needed a trouble-shooter, since we had no idea whether it was a hardware or software problem, but Comp USA doesn’t make house calls for that sort of thing. We would have to bring the computer in. Since all Comp USA stores have disappeared from our area over the last couple of years, and the nearest service center is now two hours away, that was out of the question. I would either have to figure it out myself, or we would give up on the service contract and hire a private computer expert.

I studied the Nero manual from cover-to-cover trying to decipher any possible software issues, and eventually learned that there was an electronic log file on my hard drive that listed all the error messages when a process failed. I read the log, and most of it made no sense to me . . . except for one line out of seventeen pages that indicated a DVD +RW disc is not compatible with the Windows XT operating system on our computer. Perhaps all I needed was a different disc! After making the first DVD copy on a stray blank DVD disc, we had gone out and bought what we assumed were the best quality DVD discs in the store, the “plus” version. It was midnight and all the stores were closed, so I hardly slept all night, wondering if my problems would all be solved by the simple purchase of a different DVD disc, without the “plus.”

The next day, I bought a small package of blank DVD-R discs, took them home, and tried making the copy. Unbelievably, this time it worked.

So this story is ended, and I’m not sure that the message is. I don’t know why it took Comp USA four tries to get the right part to us, and I don’t know why the technician didn’t know about the Nero error log. I love having a computer at home, but I’m just not smart enough to know everything about it. And I sure miss the IT department at the company where I used to work!