Messed Up Plextor PX-712A

[Jude Lucien]

I just bought a Plextor PX-712A IDE dvd burner.

The hardware it is on is an Asus A7V333 motherboard with 768MB ram on
XP SP2. The drive is the master on the secondary IDE controller. I
previously had a Creative dvd-rom on there and it worked fine.
Windows can see the new drive.

I took out the Creative drive, and installed the Plextor. Everything
was fine, I created a dvd iso. When I tried to burn it to a dvd-r
disc using Roxio Disc Copy it started the burn, transferred 29MB and
then just hung up. The light on the dvd player was solid green and it
was just spinning away.

I tried burning the iso with another blank disc using PlexTools
Professional. It made it to 73MB transferred and hung up.

So I went to Plextor's site and downloaded the firmware upgrade, and
flashed the drive.

Now Windows can still see the drive, but it is useless. When I try
and open My Computer, or any Explorer window with the F: drive in it,
the window hangs and the buriner is spinning with a solid green light.
When I insert a new disc, whether it be blank media or a movie, the
pc crawls to a halt for about 5 minutes, with the drive just spinning
away. If I open any of my burning software, when it tries to read the
drive the whole pc comes to a crawl and the program stops responding
and cannot be closed, even with using End Task in Task Manager. It
won't play movies, in short, it won't do anything.

I tried flashing the drive again, but it gave me a message that the
update failed.

Can anyone point me in the right direction for further
troubleshooting? I am going to try the diagnostics outlined in the
manual tonight but I was interested to see if anyone else has had a
comparable problem.

Thanks,
Jude.

 

[Richard Dower]

Just RMA it.

 

[Mr Koko]

I had my 708A fail a few weeks after I bought it. Give the front of the
drive a few good "bangs" and see what happens, my drive started working
after that but it didn't last long before it would fail again. Do like R.
Dower said call for an RMA #. They will have you do a self test on the unit
first. My replacement unit has been fine for months now.

 

[Jan Alter]

Plextors, from what I've used, and especially what I've read from others
have a pretty sparkling reputation. I believe they also have free telephone
support. In any case it sounds as if the one you're working with needs
replacement and you'll get the quickest satisfaction by an RMA.