DVR-105 Sense Errors
About a month ago, the DVR-105 in my Quicksilver PowerMac began issuing “0x72 Sense Errors" at the end of a burn of a multisession CD. Roxio’s support site and several online forums suggested this was a hardware problem, and that the drive had suddenly gone bad. Something about its failure didn’t seem right to me. So, I held onto the drive even though I removed it from service.
When rebuilding my system in the new case (see the paragraph above), I put the DVR-105 in as the “master” optical drive and a placeholder. I had tried to flash the drive’s firmware in the hopes that a firmware update might fix whatever the problem was, but every flasher I had tried, both under Windows and the Mac OS, had reported “Target drive not found”. I finally found references to an online flasher that someone had used when they also had that problem, so I downloaded it, gave it a shot; and it worked! My OEM drive became a Pioneer running version 1.33 versus version 1.0 firmware. I then burned about 300 MB of material to a CD-RW as a test, and it worked like a charm. I declared the drive “fixed” and removed it from the PC and put it back in my QuickSilver, swapping it with a black DVR-106 that went into my PC. To test it in the Mac, I burned 275Mb of material to a 16X CD-R and 3GB of material to a DVD-RW. No problems at all.
Imagine my surprise when I put in a CD-R to add a few files to a multisession CD and the sense error reappeared! Suspicious of that I might have incompatible media, I went to Wal-Mart and purchased some 52X CD’s from a different manufacturer. The drive handled them with aplomb.
The media that had malfunctioned were Philips 52X CD-R 80’s. I had picked up two 50CD stacks of them at Office Depot on a special buy. To be fair, the media works fine on my PowerBook, and the DVR-105 is the oldest drive I have here. However, I now have a bunch of CDR’s I can’t use and won’t buy Philips again. I’ve used TDK, Memorex, and Verbatim without errors on every drive in my office.
The thing to get out of this is that “sense errors” may be related to your media as well as your drive's hardware. That’s something I couldn’t find documented. Check the situation out by performing the same type of burn that produced the error message but use other brands of media before making up your mind about what the problem is. You might save yourself a fair chunk of change.
When rebuilding my system in the new case (see the paragraph above), I put the DVR-105 in as the “master” optical drive and a placeholder. I had tried to flash the drive’s firmware in the hopes that a firmware update might fix whatever the problem was, but every flasher I had tried, both under Windows and the Mac OS, had reported “Target drive not found”. I finally found references to an online flasher that someone had used when they also had that problem, so I downloaded it, gave it a shot; and it worked! My OEM drive became a Pioneer running version 1.33 versus version 1.0 firmware. I then burned about 300 MB of material to a CD-RW as a test, and it worked like a charm. I declared the drive “fixed” and removed it from the PC and put it back in my QuickSilver, swapping it with a black DVR-106 that went into my PC. To test it in the Mac, I burned 275Mb of material to a 16X CD-R and 3GB of material to a DVD-RW. No problems at all.
Imagine my surprise when I put in a CD-R to add a few files to a multisession CD and the sense error reappeared! Suspicious of that I might have incompatible media, I went to Wal-Mart and purchased some 52X CD’s from a different manufacturer. The drive handled them with aplomb.
The media that had malfunctioned were Philips 52X CD-R 80’s. I had picked up two 50CD stacks of them at Office Depot on a special buy. To be fair, the media works fine on my PowerBook, and the DVR-105 is the oldest drive I have here. However, I now have a bunch of CDR’s I can’t use and won’t buy Philips again. I’ve used TDK, Memorex, and Verbatim without errors on every drive in my office.
The thing to get out of this is that “sense errors” may be related to your media as well as your drive's hardware. That’s something I couldn’t find documented. Check the situation out by performing the same type of burn that produced the error message but use other brands of media before making up your mind about what the problem is. You might save yourself a fair chunk of change.
posted by Andy Foster at
2:31 PM
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