CD Rom alignment

[melott]

Does anyone know how to align the head on a CD Rom??
I have a CD read/write drive I bought new and used
very little. It worked fine until I layed the case
(a PC tower) on its side. I was testing several
GFX, sound and SCSI cards.After I finished testing
the cards and stood the tower case upright again.
Now the drive gives me a 'Drive Not Ready' error.
I'm guessing its alignment, as I said, the drive is
like new.

[Ilwrath]

I doubt it's alignment.  They're pretty resiliant.  

I might check cables, etc.  If you were working in there, you may have jarred the ribbon cable loose, or possibly even damaged the ribbon cable.  Make sure it's firmly plugged in on both ends.  Check the power cable, while your at it.

Either of those is much more likely to give a "drive not ready" error.  

Usually if a CD drive itself heads south, one of three things will happen.  Either it won't spin up [bad motor], it won't spin down [bad laser/alignment], or it won't even be recognized [bad logic board].

[melott]

Hmmm.... It spins up and I've checked the cables,
they're OK. I've tried all the usual things, with
no luck.
I'm guessing it has to be alignment. When I was
testing those cards I had to turn the machine on
and off. Each time I turned the machine on the drive
would spin and I think I had a disk was in it at first.
It seems a shame to have to pitch an almost new drive.
But if I can't realign it I guess I'll have to.

[patrik]

@melott:

If it were an alignment issue, it would most likely not be worth the time needed to realign it, given that a replacement CD-ROM can be found for a few bucks. I must say that I am not a fan of this "wear, tear quickly and buy a new one" trend of today, but often it is just not worth it to spend a lot of time, say half a day, repairing something when you can get a new one for a symbolic sum. Though, in your freetime its not like you are loosing money by repairing something, disregarding how cheap it is.

At work it is only profitable to repair rather expensive things by yourself instead of buying a new replacements. Just consider how much a CD-ROM repair would cost the company hiring you, given that you need half a day to repair it. That would be 4 hours of salary for the company - in other words a very expensive repair, you could actually buy a bunch of CD-ROMs for that amount of money.

Am I babbling to much..........?


/Patrik

[melott]

@Patrik

I agree with what you say..........
But this is my home PC, and in that respect, if
I can spend a couple hours repairing something I
figure I'm that much ahead because I would be just
setting around watching TV or some other very important
thing :-D
Plus, I live out in the boonies and I have to mail-order
just about everything I want. (The price I pay for my
solitude)

[Lemonty]

Bit of a long shot this one, since your drive is new and all... I have cleaned the head of my audio cd player in the past. It had trouble positioning on tracks but was perfectly usable again after cleaning with a cotton swab stick and some alcohol. Haven't tried that on CD-ROMs though.
In Dutch we say "rest rusts" (rust roest) meaning that even something that is idle will deteriorate in time.

-Edit
The CD-ROM should have some self-alignment intelligence of its own. Maybe switching power on/off repeatedly a couple of times helps.