Optical Drives Resetting DMA Broke Drive?

[Confuzzeled23]

Hey Everyone,
Today I went and reset the DMA on my drive using DVDFab so the read speeds would be faster. After I did this, the drive stopped working all together. First I put in a DVD, it made awful grinding noises so I ejected it. Then I tried a different CD and the drive took the CD, but it wouldn't spin up. It just made a strange like beep noise, err-eee-errr and it wouldn't read. So I am guessing my SuperDrive is toast? Is this something that I done?

Also, I am out of AppleCare, I didn't opt for the extra warranty because I've never had to use it in my life. However, of course, I would now. Is there anything that can be done about this?

Or will I just have to buy an external drive for my movie watching needs!

Anyone else experience this type of issue and know a fix?
Thanks everyone.

PS - This happened a month ago, still not working. People on the MacRumors forum told me that resetting the DMA broke the drive. Is this even possible or did the drive just decide to break?
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Macbook 2.0Ghz Aluminum - 2GB Ram - Using Windows 7 Pro 64-bit

[Guest]

I personally have never heard of resitting the DMA doing any damage to a drive and do not believe it could happen.

Since laptops generate a lot of heat and you are using it to watch movies hours at a time I think that is more likely the cause.

Get an External and eliminate the stress and heat from your laptop.

[sunny]

Hi Confuzzeled23,

How old your CD/DVD drive is? If your DVD/CD-ROM has been used for a long time, that will result in mechanical wear, and make the stability of loading CD/DVD disc to fall.

Our suggestion is that you should uninstall and reinstall your DVD/CD-ROM, or change a new drive to see the result.

Kind regards,
sunny
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[Confuzzeled23]

Hi,
Thanks so much for your replies so far. My drive is almost 2 years old this coming March. I am hoping to get a new laptop next summer anyway as I do not like the whole Mac OS X experience at all and I am currently using Windows 7 on it right now.

So, I guess my drive has just given out? I just wanted to be sure it wasn't my fault for resetting the DMA on the drive. I have uninstalled the drive from device manager and rebooted but the drive will still not read anything. I guess it was mechanical failure.

I guess I'll just see what it's like not having a drive on my laptop, always wondered how people survived without one on their netbooks and some new laptops. Maybe I'll get a cheap external drive.

Thanks again, would have been great if there was a way I could fix it myself, but looks like there isn't. Oh well.

[maineman]

Well, it's alwways possible this is a coincidence, but as my compadre Gruñón said, I've never heard of resetting DMA causing a hardware failure...
a failure to perform correctly, sure, but not fry the drive itself.

Did you only use the Fab reset DMA option for this?

Firstly, I'd do as sunny suggested and uninstall the burner in Win7 device manager. On reboot, windows will recognize, reinstall the hardware and
assign the appropriate native windows driver.
I know nothing about macs, but your running Win7, so hopefully this will work.

This is a slimline burner in a Macbook correct?
Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but slimline drives are less than ideal for video archiving (in truth, they're actually crappy to marginal).

Now, if and when you go with a windows lappie, don't spend a lot on a fancy, internal slimline drive.
Buy a decent external burner or buy an internal and an external enclosure for it.
You'll have far better results, ultimately spend less $ and get to keep the rest of your hair....

Also, you can do some bench tests on your current drive.
Download and install the old, nero cd-dvd speed utility:

Nero CD-DVD Speed v4.7.7.16

This is the older freeware version.
Nero now sells it for $25 and calls it opti-drive...
save your $ and use the older freewware version.

You can run a ton of diagnostics and bench tests with it.
You can even run the "Create Disc" utility which will yield data such as write speed, disc rotation, cpu utilization and drive buffer.

It's free and will only cost you some time and maybe $0.10-0.15 for a blank disc...LOL