device not ready (no reference position found)

[foxchief]

I have three Lite-On's and I like them.

 

Not to mention the tens (hundreds?) of thousands Sony DVD recorders which are re-badged Lite-ons

 

oh that's cool. Yeah it used to be a solid little 40 dollar burner I got from Wal Mart. Just shocked it went out so quick. I got a cd burner works great, manufactured in 2000! I guess I just got a weak made device.

[slipkid]

i'm having vitrually this same problem! came up here as part of my research trying to figure out what is wrong and found this thread

 

i was burning DVDs today with no issues then all of sudden one aborted with an error msg and ever since my Lite-on 20A1H drive will no longer read any official DVD, or burned DVD-R/+R and won't recognize any blank DVD media either - "gives Device not ready (no reference position found)" in IMGBURN

 

after several hours of reading on 'net i am (sadly) concluding that my Lite-On burner is just dying...it still reads CDs but that is about it....very disappointing in that it is only 1 year old

 

any recommendations for new drive models appreciated! i already started reading some reviews but things get so complicated & confusing my head is spinning trying to pick the "best" one

 

basically i need IDE drive, don't care about "lightscribe", need something that writes DVD -R and +R "well" over large # of brands but specifically known to work well with taiwanese verbatims -R/+R (since that is what i usually use), dual layer is nice but not a must-have, would like a drive good at CD DAE both in extracting well on good & bad discs plus decent speed with EAC in accurate mode, has low CPU usage, has ability to be patched for region-free DVD access, works well with EAC & IMGBURN, and i forget what else.....also my motherboard seems to have a limitation which prevented my current burner from going above ultraDMA mode 2, which meant even though it was supposed to support 16x writes i never got much about 8x, so with a new burner i don't even need a 22x screamer since i will never be able to get that fast anyways....