Pioneer BDR-S13U-X (fw 1.03) Randomly Hangs PC When Burning Discs

[pendell]

Essentially what happens is, when the disc is done burning (DVD or BD, I haven't burned many CDs), when it does the "Cycle Tray before Verify" step, a good 50% of the time, instead of progressing normally, the drive gets locked in some sort of null state, where it never reports the disc being re-inserted. It hangs in such a way that any software that dares try to interact with the optical drive hangs or crashes. Only way to close ImgBurn in this state is through Task Manager, and if I try to open the drive in File Explorer, it crashes the entire explorer.exe process and the start menu disappears for a few minutes. Swapping out the disc with another or leaving the drive empty does not change the situation. The only fix is a full reboot - but even that gets interrupted - whether I Restart or Shut Down, the PC gets to the stage where it's no longer displaying anything and the monitor goes to sleep, but the PC continues to hang and never fully shuts down/reboots until I force it to with the restart or power buttons. If I take no direct action, the computer will simply never turn off, because the optical drive is preventing it from doing so.

For context, this issue was present on Windows 10 and still on Windows 11, my machine has an Asus PRIME B350-M motherboard, Ryzen 7 5700X CPU, 16GB of RAM, and an RTX 3060 (though the issue was also present when I ran an ancient GTX 980). I do have software like MakeMKV and XReveal installed, though I never let these programs auto-run and the issue still happens on a fresh boot where they have never been opened. I'm not sure if this is an issue with the motherboard - I keep the BIOS up to date and it's never fixed the problem - or the drive itself - I'm never upgrading the firmware if that's the only thing that would fix this bug, because it's a holy grail drive one of the last that came stock from the factory with the LibreDrive-compatible 1.03 firmware. It works great for ripping all manner of discs, and when it does burn and verify the results are consistent and very good, but this is a pretty major annoyance, and I was wondering if anyone else had dealt with it or knew of any fixes.

[dbminter]

The only 2 suggestions I have are when ImgBurn gets stuck trying to cycle the tray, try manually ejecting the tray with the drive's physical eject button and manually reload the tray.  If the drive is in an external enclosure, before rebooting, try power cycling the enclosure and see if that prevents Windows from hanging trying to restart.