I don't think that the drive is dead; I recently burned five more perfect SL disks (from the same spindle). The drive came w/ 8L06 firmware, but I tried updating to 8L08 about 6 months ago. I found that it seemed to induce errors when burning dual-layer. Made two burns, two different movies & there were sector errors, in the exact same locations, on both. Downgraded back to 8L06 & reburned those same two films; they were perfect.