675,865 reviews,
402 today

MD1032 · 01-11-2004, 12:43 PM

I have a Pioneer DVR 106 DVD burner drive. I was playing Jedi Academy yesterday and today (I got it off newegg. Awesome game!) and the extended hours in which I play appear to be overheating it. I played for about 5 hours yesterday and 3 hours today (both continuously). I stupidly installed the game on my new drive instead of my old CD-RW drive.

The drive appears to be frying. My mom last night came into my room and said she smelled a burning electronic smell. I noticed nothing. This mornin about about 3.5 hours of play, the smoke alarms in my house go off. After my mom turned off the circuit breaker, I realized there was indeed a burning smell in my room. I immediately blamed Jedi Academy, which I'm running with maxed out detail for 3-4 hours straight.

I cracked my case open. The dust wasn't too bad, and wasn't interfering with my processor or graphics card fans (I was worried about my ti4200 to be honest). After smelling around, I realized that my processor and graphics card wasn't he source of the problem, as there was no smell soming from them. The DVD burner, on the other hand, was emitting a STRONG burning electronics odor, and I mean STRONG. My mouth tasted like metal after taking a whiff of the place where the fan outtake is.

Closed things back up and posted here. So far, smoke detectors are behaving (we turned them back on and they chriped for a half second two times and then stopped), but then again, I haven't run my DVD burner since before the incident.

Basically, I've got a DVD burner that starts to fry itself after 3-5 hours of continuous use, and between my various cooling and case fans, made its way to my smoke detectors. What the heck do I do? Do I have a bad drive? Thanks.

I will be using my CD-RW drive to run JA from now on.

Gettinbye · 01-11-2004, 12:57 PM

If you're just reading with the drive, it shouldn't be overheating/frying like that. First thing I would check is the power on your 12v rail (depending on your motherboard, you should be able to see it in BIOS-if not, use Sisoft Sandra).
If you don't have overvoltage on the 12v rail, sounds to me like you should be returning the drive (hopefully it is still under warranty).
Something that will save your optical drive(s) from excessive wear: create a virtual CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive on your hard drive. Games will run faster and without unecessary stress to optical drives.

MD1032 · 01-11-2004, 03:15 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by Gettinbye
If you're just reading with the drive, it shouldn't be overheating/frying like that. First thing I would check is the power on your 12v rail (depending on your motherboard, you should be able to see it in BIOS-if not, use Sisoft Sandra).
If you don't have overvoltage on the 12v rail, sounds to me like you should be returning the drive (hopefully it is still under warranty).
Something that will save your optical drive(s) from excessive wear: create a virtual CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive on your hard drive. Games will run faster and without unecessary stress to optical drives.

The drive is brand new, I've never used it before for anything but playback on one audio CD for a couple minutes.

What is a virtual CD-ROM?

Gettinbye · 01-11-2004, 03:51 PM

A virtual CD/DVD-ROM is a method of using software to "fool" your O/S into thinking it has an optical device, where the data is actually located on the hard drive, but it looks and acts like a CD/DVD-ROM drive. In effect, you'll be running from your hard-drive, but windows will see it as running from an optical drive.
There are quite a few different pieces of software that do this. The one I use is virtual CD v5 (I'm sure there are better ones out there-maybe someone else can recommend). I'll look for a freeware version and post a link back if I find one.
*EDIT* here's a link-bear in mind that I haven't tried this particular program myself...
http://www.softwarepatch.com/windows/xpvirtualcd.html

MD1032 · 01-12-2004, 02:03 PM

If I can't find a freeware version, I'll just download the full version off the internet, but this is an idea I'm definitely liking.

osprey4 · 01-12-2004, 02:09 PM

Keep in mind that this will require a considerable amount of space on your hard drive (which I think is getting a bit short). You should try to clear some old stuff off first.