It has taken me a few days (have a 6 week old daughter!) I have replaced the drive and guess what??
It works beautifully!! The drive have performed flawlessly since the install, so obviously it was a problem with the drive all along.
I think that the optical drive is out of balance which is:
1. Making it very noisy;
2. Causing the intermittent read errors.
Anyway, all sorted – thank goodness for a solid testing process!!
Well… tested a system the other day and found that the DVD player was not working correctly. It appears to have an intermittent problem with playing DVD’s, both bought and burnt.
What happens is that the drive appears to seek for a master file or record, but can not find it. So it continually seeks the first track to locate the menu. Because it does not find it, the DVD drive is rendered inoperable and systems slows right down because it processes commands in between seeks.
Not sure what has caused this issue, however I think it is to do with the DVD drive itself. I have purchased another drive to install (most likely tomorrow) which I will test. Hopefully it is the drive…
To date I have tested:
1. DVD43 – uninstalled and reinstalled. Worked once, then stopped.
2. Updated DVD drive firm ware – worked once, then stopped.
3. Checked codecs. I know these are installed because the DVD drive has actually played a Region 4 DVD. It has also played a region free DVD.
So we’ll see how it all pans out tomorrow…