hi, about 4 months ago my cd burner that came with my 1 year-old dell system stopped working. Since then I havent tried to fix it because my warranty has run out, and also because I am lazy. Recently I have been wanting to burn quite a few disk images, and need to get things sorted out.

I believe that this burner is manufactured by sony, though I am not sure. When I try to burn I get the following error messages (through easy CD creator 5):

E80041882: CD Error -Power Calabration area error - [03/73/03]

---The Second:---

E80041925: TrackWrite Error -command retry failed - [T7118]

I have tried burning using windows explorer and it gives me some unknown error. Help would be great.

-The Bumstedman

It's dead.

Watch ads at BestBuy, OfficeMax, etc.

Buy a new CD burner for about $10-20 after rebates.

really? what could cause a burner to fail like that after only 1 year????

-The Bumstedman


Edit--->> btw, I looked at Roxio's fix for the 1st error message and they said that it was most likely was a problem with the media that I was using telling the Burner to give too much power to the laser.

I tried it with another brand of media (Sony--> "compatible") and the CD (audio) burned with no errors, and when I tried to play it, the disc was unreadable (iTunes detected the tracks, but froze when it tried to play them).


Hmmmm... Strange

I don't know why they fail. They just do. I have a pile of old burners in my basement. I have no idea why I keep them.

well, thanks for the help, I just installed the CD/RW drive from my server into my main PC, and it burns great. Glad I actually took the time to do it this time!

-The Bumstedman

Two things that I know of can happen. CD drives have two round capstains that squeeze the disk and spin it so it can be read. When the capstains get dust and lint built up they can't spin the disk at a steady speed and it can't read the data. The same thing causes CD RW drives to fail to write correctly. If you have some patience you can open the drive and clean them with Q tips and alcohol. DO NOT TOUCH THE LASER LENS. It's a small glass lens just off the edge of the capstains.

Second, the laser lens can get dirty. Cleaners can be purchased pretty cheap to remedy that problem.

Then after a while, the drive can simply quit...it's usually somewhat more than a year, but they do give up. It might be a misalignment that develops over time due to wear on the rods the laser lens travels on, the motor goes bad or an electronic component failure. A year seems short though, one of my burners is going on 4, the other is pushing 3 pretty hard...