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.

[pendell]

On 1/4/2026 at 7:55 AM, dbminter said:

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.

Ah, I did leave out one part that makes it all extra odd - mechanically the drive is fine. I can press the eject button and it will open the tray, push the tray back in and it will close happily, spin up, seem to initialize the disc and spin it up for a few minutes, all the things you'd expect it to do, it's just that the PC it's attached to does not see any of this. Eventually the drive spins down because as far as it's concerned, nothing is interacting with it. But ImgBurn does not even recognize I've ejected the tray, on the software end the drive is in purgatory, perpetually stuck cycling the tray, but hardware-wise the drive acts like nothing is amiss, like it's the computer's problem for suddenly no longer recognizing its state. It seems like it is the computer's fault in some inexplicable way.

The drive is an internal one so power cycling it individually isn't easily possible - now I wish I had gone for the external variant of this drive, though.

Usually after rebooting the PC with the reset button I can load up the file I burned and verify the disc and it will verify just fine, so nothing gets messed up in the burning process, it's just that moment right after it's done finalizing where it can get in this odd null state. I actually just burned 4 DVDs back to back and they all burned and verified no problem, and then the fifth DVD it locked up after burning and I had to reboot. It's inconsistent as hell - all 5 discs were burned to DVD+R DLs from the same brand, and all eventually verified just fine.

Could this be some sort of BIOS/SATA setting issue?

[dbminter]

Most unlikely a BIOS issue.

 

One thing that might help is to change the I/O Driver in the ImgBurn Settings.  Try changing to a different I/O and see if the issue goes away.  If it doesn't, try changing to a different option and repeat.