Knackered laptop CD drive
Posted by: Dungassin on 09 February 2012
Well, here I am busily using dBpoweramp to rip my CD collection whilst awaiting delivery of my NDX. Done about 300 so far, but of the last 20, 6 have had failed rips on the last 1-3 tracks. Beginning to wonder if I'm burning out the CD drive on my Acer laptop (it's actually a Bluray drive as well). I asked SWMBO if I could borrow her laptop to see if it had the same problem with those CDs, but she said a rather rude word to me ...
Think I'll have to go out and buy an external CD drive to do the other 1800 or so ... 
My Dell XPS is still going strong after approx. 600 CD rips ....
Sometimes it pays off to spend a little more .... hang on, haven't I read this before on THIS forum? 
Went along to PCWorld and got a £35 LG GE24DVD/CD rewriter drive. Works very well. Quiet; rips at about twice the speed of the laptop's internal drive. Alas, the supplied power supply only came with an American type 2 pin plug! Stupid. As a result, when I managed to find an adapter in my box of bits, I somehow unplugged the QNAP NAS from the mains, and after that my Network wouldn't recognise either my QNAP or Buffalo NAS drives! The internet was OK, but none of my attached devices were appearing in Computer>Network. Thought at first I'd managed to fry the router part of my Netgear N600! Shutdown and restart didn't cure it, so ...
Finished up getting out my old BTHomeHub2 to get the new external CD drive working. Just now reconnected via the N600 (after it was switched off for an hour) and all working again. Haven't done anything else other than remove it and put it back again after an hour. Bloody computers ... 
Incidentally, of the CDs which wouldn't rip properly, another one ripped OK with the new drive, but the rest still suffer the same problem on the new CD drive. The tracks involved are all at the end of the CD. Some of the CDs of near 74 or 80 minute length. In one case (Santana, Ultimate Collection), the problem only occurs with the last track on CD1 of the 2 disc set. A Lee Sankey CD of about 45 minutes length is another one of the problem discs. All of them play OK on my DVD5/nDAC, and all are visually flawless (no fingerprints, scratches etc). I suspect I'll probably finish up playing the suspect tracks on my CDS and copying them in the analogue domain onto my Denon CD recorder, then hence back into dBPoweramp. Bit of a faff. In the meantime I managed to rip most of the suspect tracks by turning off Secure ripping - I'll have to see (hear?) what they sound like when the NDX arrives.
As an addendum, I discovered that Shania Twain's "Up!" (so I like Country - sue me, although it's a heavily compressed recording) won't rip at all. In fact my computer won't even read the disc or admit it's in the CD drive. Must be copy protected in some way. Yes ... I did turn off autorun, before anyone asks.