I've cleaned lenses with 91% isopropyl alcohol and a cotton swap before. Should be fine.

Did it read disk perfectly after?

If you are sure the disk is not corrupted. You should try to open the CD/DVD drive and check for dust or dirty lenses.
If after cleaning it, still does not work, it may be a mechanical failure (drive cannot spin the disk to the neccessary reading speed). Or it could also be the IDE/EIDE cable used.

Those symptoms are usually indication that the drives are failing and there's nothing you can do about it. From my experience, optical drives tend to fail after a few years of use and it's usually not feasible to repair them.

Without being too sure what I think is happening is that the lens or other part of the laser focusing mechanism gets worn out and the drive just can't focus the laser on the correct spot, which means it can't read data properly. The early symptoms of this are increased difficulty reading discs and even the complete inability to read CD-R or CD-RW discs when it used to work fine before.

If cleaning the lens does nothing you could try to adjust the trimpot that controls laser power or focus, but it won't be easy finding those and it's even possible some drives don't have them, and you would have to completely disassemble the unit.

I take them apart, clean them with alcohol and cotton tips.
Or I have used one of them cleaning cd's in the past.

If nothing helps, then I scrap the drive.

Errors reading a file in the Windows install can actually be caused by system instability, such as bad RAM or an unstable overclock, etc. I've been bit by that before. The behavior in those cases can be surprisingly consistent and make you think it's surely a disc issue when in fact it's not.

If this is an nLite disc, some optical drives don't get along well with many CDR/DVDR discs. I think this has become a bigger problem as time has passed and cheap discs have strayed farther and farther from being compatible with drives that weren't specifically designed to tolerate them. As the drives got more forgiving, the discs got more sloppy.
I've found that some of my cheap discs (Maxells and Memorex) don't work worth a damn on some of my drives, while Sonys (mine are old discs with an actual Sony MID) and Taiyo Yudens work great. Recently I had to reburn some linux discs when I was experimenting on an old box.

I'd be careful with cleaning CD/DVD drive lenses with alcohol - years ago a friend cleaned the lense of his drive with alcohol and it partially melted it - I presume it was a plastic lense which in itself is quite amazing.

Stick the drive into a know working system (replacing the working system CDROM drive) and try reading a pressed original CD after cleaning the lense (I just use a q-tip and window cleaner). This will clear up any issues with bad IDE cables and issues with some CDR and CDRW media.

shamino wrote:

Errors reading a file in the Windows install can actually be caused by system instability, such as bad RAM or an unstable overclock, etc. I've been bit by that before. The behavior in those cases can be surprisingly consistent and make you think it's surely a disc issue when in fact it's not.

If this is an nLite disc, some optical drives don't get along well with many CDR/DVDR discs. I think this has become a bigger problem as time has passed and cheap discs have strayed farther and farther from being compatible with drives that weren't specifically designed to tolerate them. As the drives got more forgiving, the discs got more sloppy.
I've found that some of my cheap discs (Maxells and Memorex) don't work worth a damn on some of my drives, while Sonys (mine are old discs with an actual Sony MID) and Taiyo Yudens work great. Recently I had to reburn some linux discs when I was experimenting on an old box.

I do have a few nlite made disc and some of my drive seem like they have a hard time with my modern burnt disc. Ill still make the effort to clean them out though.

I remember my first DVD burner when they started becoming commercially available. After a while it had reading and burning issues. I used to take it apart and grease the lens rails with silicon grease, which gave it a few months more life (maybe I burned too many discs?). As much as it cost I couldn't just chuck it.

Some older drives cannot read burned media, only pressed, but on the other hand I have had some 4x cd roms have no problems with any disks. Does anyone know if there are specific brands of CD ROMs and DVD ROMs that are better quality than others, and are older drives built better than newer ones. I know this is the case with VCRs. The old ones are built like tanks and last forever if taken care of and the newer ones are light as a feather and you are lucky if they last a year. Just curious.

Tommaso

Well, some people might say Taiyo-Yuden (sp?) or certain Verbatims. I use Verbatims personally, DVD-R I think. If you google your drive model, there is a certain website where people release utilities and/or updated firmware increasing the media compatibility of many optical drives.

Tommaso wrote:

Some older drives cannot read burned media, only pressed, but on the other hand I have had some 4x cd roms have no problems with any disks. Does anyone know if there are specific brands of CD ROMs and DVD ROMs that are better quality than others, and are older drives built better than newer ones. I know this is the case with VCRs. The old ones are built like tanks and last forever if taken care of and the newer ones are light as a feather and you are lucky if they last a year. Just curious.

Tommaso

Newer DVD drives eventually got to be so cheap that I have a hard time believing they could possibly be built as well, but I don't really know. As far as burners are concerned, one real problem with older burners is that they don't have firmware updates for more recent blank discs. Whenever a blank disc is inserted, the drive checks the MID code and finds a burning strategy in it's firmware for those particular discs. If it doesn't have a strategy for those discs then it uses a generic one, which works but results in a lower quality burn.

My main PC has 2 burners in it. One is my old Pioneer DVR-108, the other is a more modern (and cheap) Optiarc AD-7200S.
Both produce good burns with Taiyo Yuden 8X DVD+R discs, because that's an old series of discs so both drives have a well developed recording strategy for them. However, my cheap RiData 16X DVD+R discs give lousy burn quality on the old Pioneer, while they give good results on the Optiarc and another newer drive. The difference in burn quality with those is dramatic, and it's surely because the Pioneer doesn't recognize them and is using a generic burn strategy.

Over at myce.com (formerly and better known as CDFreaks), the most popular tool for scanning disc quality is Nero CD-DVD Speed. The results vary depending on the drive, so the more enthusiastic people over there have separate drives that they like to use just for scanning.

Tommaso wrote:

Some older drives cannot read burned media, only pressed,

This. Keep in mind that there were once two competing standards, CD-R and CD+R.
Older CD-ROM drives may not be aware of "burned" CDs, but read them nevertheless if quality is good.
CD-RWs and CD+RWs are a bit more difficult, I think. A lot of 90s drives can't read them properly.
The reverse is also true, btw. Some of the newer drives nolonger support older standards, like CD-i (green book) or mixed-mode.
And sometimes it's also a drivers fault. For example, MSCDEX understands the CD-i format, but its counterpart in Win 9.x doesn't.
For DVD stuff, things may be even more complex as they do contain meta data of some sort (manufacturer, model, snr, date code).
So if possible, perfom a firmware upgrade for the drive so it can recognize more/newer CD types.

Jo22 wrote:

This. Keep in mind that there were once two competing standards, CD-R and CD+R. Older CD-ROM drives may not be aware of "burned" […]
Show full quote

Tommaso wrote:

Some older drives cannot read burned media, only pressed,

This. Keep in mind that there were once two competing standards, CD-R and CD+R.
Older CD-ROM drives may not be aware of "burned" CDs, but read them nevertheless if quality is good.
CD-RWs and CD+RWs are a bit more difficult, I think. A lot of 90s drives can't read them properly.
The reverse is also true, btw. Some of the newer drives nolonger support older standards, like CD-i (green book) or mixed-mode.
And sometimes it's also a drivers fault. For example, MSCDEX understands the CD-i format, but its counterpart in Win 9.x doesn't.
For DVD stuff, things may be even more complex as they do contain meta data of some sort (manufacturer, model, snr, date code).
So if possible, perfom a firmware upgrade for the drive so it can recognize more/newer CD types.

Never heard of CD+R/CD+RW discs?!

Early CD-ROM units can't read CD-RW discs. Some later ones have problem with 80++ min discs.

I agree that earlier CDROM drives are the most sensitive to disc quality, not having been designed with any special tolerance for burned discs at all. IMO DVD drives usually aren't much of a problem, although my first DVD-ROM drive (which was a 16X so it wasn't even that early of a model) seems to be one of the exceptions.

Early in the year I bought a large supply of Taiyo Yuden CDR discs (they had just gone out of production) because I was concerned about being able to burn discs that will work on early CDROM drives of the early to mid-90s, including those that aren't in PCs and can't feasibly be replaced with anything more modern. Sometime I want to experiment with different combinations of burners and recording speeds to figure out what makes the most readable discs for picky drives. I'm especially curious to find out if an old SCSI Plextor CDRW drive (premium CD-only burners) will make more readable CDs than a more modern DVD burner will, or if it's the other way around.

As far as how to rehab a drive that you're sure should be working better, I don't know a step by step but I suspect you might be able to find some detailed tutorials about this kind of thing in the game console world. People working with stuff like Playstations and Sega/NEC CDROM addons probably have a lot of experience with this subject, since it's not as easy for them to just replace the drive as it is with PCs.

kixs wrote:

Never heard of CD+R/CD+RW discs?!

Oh my, sorry! 😊 Must have been DVD+R(W) then..
But I'm glad I'm not the only one who confused these things..
http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/forum/helproom-1/c … ference-309678/