DVD Burner Causing Boot failure

[Hood]

Today I ran into a strange problem with my main system. I was converting a video and web browsing, when it blue screened. Thinking my overclock wasn't stable, I hard rebooted with the power switch, and tried to get into the BIOS. I never got there, it started to POST, loaded the ROM for my M.2 drive, and then went to a blank BIOS screen, and stayed there. I noticed my 2 digit readout was showing 00, when it should be A0, and the boot device LED remained lit. So I cleared CMOS, (pushed button and removed batt), but no luck. I then removed all the SATA cables from the board, and was finally able to get into the BIOS and check the boot section (it looked fine).
It also booted into Windows on my Intel PCIe 750 boot drive and ran normally, so I reconnected the storage hard drives one at a time, testing each time to make sure it still booted. The last one, my DVD burner, caused the same POST failure, and when I disconnected it again, the system booted normally.
I knew that a failing hard drive will sometimes cause this problem, but never heard of an optical drive causing this. I was sure it would turn out to be one of my aging 2 or 3 TB HDDs. But it worked out in the best way possible - a new burner only costs $20, a new hard drive would cost me at least $100, and I'd lose all the data. For a minute I had nightmare visions of a fried Z97 motherboard or a dead $400 NVMe drive. Yes, I still use the damn DVD burner, a few friends (and their kids) still have CD or DVD players they use. I'll ditch the burner one day, but not yet.

 

[GoldenX]

Both lucky and weird.
I've seen some DVD burners stopping post, but never breaking the UEFI start. SATA controller's fault?

 

[Tsukiyomi91]

solution: get rid of the DVD drive.

 

[silentbogo]

Both lucky and weird.
I've seen some DVD burners stopping post, but never breaking the UEFI start. SATA controller's fault?

I've seen it a couple of times. Most recent - an ASUS ROG G75V which is sitting next to me right now. A BD-ROM has failed some time ago, but only recently the owner ran into this issue: a laptop would get stuck on black screen until you reboot it a few times, then occasional windows boot failures (but that's from failing/crumbling HDD).

 

[erpguy53]

very weird (and nearly rare) that a dvd burner would cause a boot failure

 

[Hood]

very weird (and nearly rare) that a dvd burner would cause a boot failure

I hope it's rare, I'm tired of buying new ones. When I got around to putting a new one in, I found a sticker I had put on the old one that said "installed 9-7-2016". The reason I did that was because it seemed like my burners weren't lasting very long, seemed like every year or two I had to replace it, and I was right (22 months for the last one). It was not being used much, and that last failure wasn't from use, it was just from being plugged in. If I only use it a few times a year, I could keep it unplugged and it might last forever.

 

[eidairaman1]

Today I ran into a strange problem with my main system. I was converting a video and web browsing, when it blue screened. Thinking my overclock wasn't stable, I hard rebooted with the power switch, and tried to get into the BIOS. I never got there, it started to POST, loaded the ROM for my M.2 drive, and then went to a blank BIOS screen, and stayed there. I noticed my 2 digit readout was showing 00, when it should be A0, and the boot device LED remained lit. So I cleared CMOS, (pushed button and removed batt), but no luck. I then removed all the SATA cables from the board, and was finally able to get into the BIOS and check the boot section (it looked fine).
It also booted into Windows on my Intel PCIe 750 boot drive and ran normally, so I reconnected the storage hard drives one at a time, testing each time to make sure it still booted. The last one, my DVD burner, caused the same POST failure, and when I disconnected it again, the system booted normally.
I knew that a failing hard drive will sometimes cause this problem, but never heard of an optical drive causing this. I was sure it would turn out to be one of my aging 2 or 3 TB HDDs. But it worked out in the best way possible - a new burner only costs $20, a new hard drive would cost me at least $100, and I'd lose all the data. For a minute I had nightmare visions of a fried Z97 motherboard or a dead $400 NVMe drive. Yes, I still use the damn DVD burner, a few friends (and their kids) still have CD or DVD players they use. I'll ditch the burner one day, but not yet.

I have had a ide cdrw drive from sony show controller failure signs with boot speed, I removed it the system booted faster, put it back in same problem, tried another drive, it didnt have the problem, threw the sony drive away.

 

[Hood]

I have had a ide cdrw drive from sony show controller failure signs with boot speed, I removed it the system booted faster, put it back in same problem, tried another drive, it didnt have the problem, threw the sony drive away.

All my previous DVD drive failures just started to mostly make coasters (from too many errors) during the burn process, I always assumed from spinning too slowly or the laser couldn't track properly.

 

[FireFox]

Why not to buy an external DVD/CD burner?

 

[dorsetknob]

I always assumed from spinning too slowly or the laser couldn't track properly.

when i manafacture coasters its usualy from trying to Burn too Fast so i usually stick too 4x

 

[qubit]

It ended well, but tell me that you've got backups of all your data?!

 

[DeathtoGnomes]

HOLD ON HERE, put your tinfoil hats on folks !

The real reason it failed? Hollywood added firmware code to burn up optical drives when burning protected movies, hence, breaking your PC for illegal activities !



Tinfoil Hats FTW!

 

[Voluman]

Erm, if you have a fault drive every 2 year, are you sure everything okay with your pc? Is the power cable to drive ok, is data cable ok? Did you try to exchange, swap those? Do you use the same port on your mobo always?
It is just wierd to me to get or make ( )a fault drive so frequent. Maybe, is bad karma only?

 

[rtwjunkie]

when i manafacture coasters its usualy from trying to Burn too Fast so i usually stick too 4x

This. Accuracy in dvd burning comes at slow speed. The faster the burn, the more chance of errors.

 

[Hood]

Erm, if you have a fault drive every 2 year, are you sure everything okay with your pc? Is the power cable to drive ok, is data cable ok? Did you try to exchange, swap those? Do you use the same port on your mobo always?
It is just wierd to me to get or make ( )a fault drive so frequent. Maybe, is bad karma only?

No, these $20 DVD drives just aren't made to last, and for a while I was burning a dozen discs per week. This time i ordered the Asus 24b1ST, which gets excellent ratings, but on looking closer, the new drive is made by Lite-on, just like the last one (it's stamped on the bottom). So who knows which ones are truly reliable? - it's a crap shoot, and I'm not lucky at dice...

 

[Voluman]

Well, if you write dozen discs per week i have no experience recently with that. Few years back Pioneer dvd-108r (or something similar if i remember correctly) and Nec (lg) drive works for me well for that usage. But again it was years ago.
Good luck with dvdlottery than