Error: Device Not Ready (Medium Not Present - Tray Closed)

[Blueie]

Hello

When I try to burn a home movie to a blank DVD disk, halfway through the process when the CD-DVD tray pops out and then pops in (I have to do it
manually), I get the following message:

Device Not Ready (Medium Not Present - Tray Closed)

This message lasts forever and in the end, I have to cancel the job. I have now wasted three Verbatim-R disks trying it over and over again. I can see the drive in Windows 10 Explorer and can play a DVD in the same drive. In fact, I used ImgBurn only a few days ago in exactly the same way without any problems.

I have tested a home movie DVD I burnt in ImgBurn and that plays just fine which suggests that my CD-DVD drive, the hardware, is working just fine.

Is the error I get related to this particular home movie file? I haven't done anything different to what I would normally do.

Thank you.

[LIGHTNING UK!]

When it pops out (technically, it's cycling the tray between write and verify), you are just pushing the tray back in, yes? Don't remove the disc. If the disc is in the tray and yet the drive is returning that status (medium not present - tray closed), it sounds like a hardware issue to me.

Please eject the tray and reinsert it.

Does the drive manage to initialise the disc after x attempts at doing that? (The details of the disc will become visible in the info panel on the right within ImgBurn)

 

[Blueie]

Thanks, Lightening, for your reply.

Yes, I just press the tray back into the drive without touching the disk and press OK on the screen as advised. Normally, this works without any problems. It was fine a few days ago. I thought myself it may be a hardware/drive problem, but yesterday I was able to watch a home movie DVD using the same drive. 

I see what you mean. Instead of waiting all day for the Device Not Ready (Medium Not Present - Tray Closed) message to disappear, you are suggesting I eject the disk and then reinsert it for X amount of times. I will try that this weekend. Could it not be a problem with the disks themselves?

Thanks again.

[LIGHTNING UK!]

>> I see what you mean. Instead of waiting all day for the Device Not Ready (Medium Not Present - Tray Closed) message to disappear, you are suggesting I eject the disk and then reinsert it for X amount of times. I will try that this weekend. Could it not be a problem with the disks themselves?

Exactly. That message isn't going to change unless you actually do something - it's already a final / resting type message.

It could be a problem with either of them.

Something, somewhere isn't working very well if the drive thinks it has burnt the disc ok but then cannot reinitialise said disc after cycling the tray. It could be the discs, but you've used them before. The drive was able to initialise them when they were blank - it burn them and then couldn't initialise them 2nd time around... so maybe it's a hardware fault. Posting a log of the burn would help, as at the moment, we have no idea about which drive/discs you're using.

 

[Blueie]

Hello again Lightening

After posting my previous message here, Windows decided to self-configure which took about an hour. Then it installed updates. I was able to then burn a DVD without a problem though I am not sure what Windows has to do with it. Then I burnt a second DVD, but had to push the tray back it a few times after again receiving the Device Not Ready (Medium Not Present - Tray Closed) message.

It reminds me of an old stuttering car that starts first time sometimes but not always, but yes, I am beginning to think it's a CD-DVD ROM drive problem although the PC is not much more than a year old.

Thanks again for your help.

[dbminter]

If it's an internal drive, the age of the PC doesn't factor into when an optical drive will die off.  Optical drives, internal or otherwise, have an average time before failure of about 7 months.

 

[Wing Commander]

Same problem.

I use Verbatim. I've burnt thousands of discs of data with this machine, built back in December of 2011, I believe. The drives are Samsung, original to the machine. They came from Fry's, back when Fry's was awesome.

I have twin optical SATA drives. I use one to read, and the other to write.

The inability to cycle the try and begin verification happens most of the time, now. I manually cycle the tray a few times, and it eventually completes the verification.

I just bought two more drives, so I can replace them if I must . . . but the machine was built in 2011. I need a new machine, anyway.

I do not know how viable a solution it would be to turn off verification, but it is incredibly rare to get a dud. I maybe see one or two in a year.

I can't imagine a seven month MTBF. That's what we put up with in the 80's and 90's with our IDE hard drives and external optical drives. I'm in year eleven with my rig. I've had the motherboard's wireless chipset fail and a video card failure to date. All my drives are original, and still going strong.

Edited June 23, 2022 by Wing Commander

[dbminter]

NEC OptiArc drives had a tendency to stop automatically cycling trays for Verify after a while of use.  It would work to manually cycle the tray and resume Verifies or do a manual Verify.  Your Samsungs may be rebranded OptiArcs, particularly if they were made 11 years ago.

[Wing Commander]

43 minutes ago, dbminter said:

NEC OptiArc drives had a tendency to stop automatically cycling trays for Verify after a while of use.  It would work to manually cycle the tray and resume Verifies or do a manual Verify.  Your Samsungs may be rebranded OptiArcs, particularly if they were made 11 years ago.

Wild. They certainly have had a lot of use. On a whim, I burned my last disc with the drive normally reserved for reading, and the verification process went off without a hitch. Of course, that proves nothing; it's only one occasion. But I have the option, and, worse comes to worse, I just swap the drives and buy more.

Thanks for the info!

[dbminter]

OptiArc's also had a tendency for failure of the eject button mechanism.  Software eject, like those issued by ImgBurn, still worked, but physically pressing the eject button wouldn't.