Hello everybody,
I have a FZ31Z with an amazing Matshita UJ-220S blu-ray writer. This drive has caused me lots of problems and now seems to reach its end of life. I've done a lot of tries with my beloved Matshita optical device searching for a software fault, including a system recovery back to Vista, but with no prevail.
So, I've run out of software tricks and I've come up to the conclusion that it's a hardware problem, as with both Vista and W7 the drive doesn't read CDs, seems to write them but after this doesn't read them, and reads DVDs very well but doesn't write them. Have tried Nero, Roxio, ImgBurn, Ashampoo, etc. Kinda weird, isn't it?
I've surfed the net and found lots of somehow similar problems with this marvelous optical drive but not a single real solution. Also this particular drive seems to be quite hard to reach, as having been an OEM Panasonic offer for Sony, Dell, Apple, etc. There are some replacements, most of them refurbished, but I am not quite determined to try such ones.
In concluding this, I would like to ask you guys if anybody has dealt with such problems with this particular type of optical drive and has been able to solve them? And, of course, how could these be solved? Maybe a better built replacement perfectly compatible with computer hard drive or something else?
Thank you very much.
P.S. - If anybody would happen to know this, could it be achievable to FLASH or RESET the optical drive firmware, as the drive isn't completely dead and the problem might be a faulty firmware install? Now I'm using 1.05 firmware version from Sony Japan website.
