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Re: HP DVD writer 840b

 
phperry
New Member

Re: HP DVD writer 840b

I have M7350N Media center with 840b LightScribe disc burner. First unit I bought from Fry's had a bad hard drive. The second unit worked great after I did a full system recovery. Not a good start with HP but the machine has been awesome until I first tried to use light scribe 11 months later.

Problem: Printing LightScribe labels only works on 50% of HP CD-Rs. Writes and reads data side of disc properly. Same problems with Memorex CD-Rs but LightScribe printed 80% of labels properly.

After extensive troubleshooting w/support center they shipped a replacement drive.

Installed new drive. Lightscribe worked properly every time. data side of discs could not be read or written to.

Put old drive back in. Same problem with 50% lightscribe success and 100% data writing success.

More support troubleshooting. They sent second replacement drive. Installed and had exact same problems as first replacement drive.

More support troubleshooting. They will send a third replacement drive.

I will let you know results of 3rd 840b drive replacement.

I'm thinking there may be a bad batch of 840b drives in the inventory. The first two replacement drives passed quality tests 4 days apart in Dec 2006. I don't know if these are new or rebuilt drives. It really does not matter as long as they are built and properly tested.

Another poster mentioned they wanted a collateral posted (credit card). They are just making sure they get their old drive returned in a timely manner. Very common in any replacement part business.

One comment in case management is looking: The folks in the Canadian Support Center are great! The center in India has a terrible telephone connection - they can hear me fine but they sound like they are in a tunnel with a bad echo. Makes it almost impossible to understand a strong accent with a bad telephone connection.
Thanks,
Pat

phperry
New Member

Re: HP DVD writer 840b

Status of my problem (previous post)
I have M7350N Media center with 840b LightScribe disc burner. First unit I bought from Fry's had a bad hard drive. The

second unit worked great after I did a full system recovery. Not a good start with HP but the machine has been awesome

until I first tried to use light scribe 11 months later.

Problem: Printing LightScribe labels only works on 50% of HP CD-Rs. Writes and reads data side of disc properly. Same

problems with Memorex CD-Rs but LightScribe printed 80% of labels properly.

Good News:
12-19-2006
Received 3rd replacement burner. It is Toshiba-Samsung TS-H652L, P/N 5188-2574, Oct 2006.
The original and two replacement drives were Hitachi-LG drives, HLGSA-4166B.
The new drive successfully wrote to both sides of CD-Rs that were previously rejected on both sides by the Hitachi drives.
My conclusion is that the Hitachi drives are inferior to the Toshiba-Samsung drives.

Thanks to HP for sending a replacement drive that works! I'd certainly recommend looking into the quality of the Hitachi drives.
Thanks,
Pat
Brian Lessard
New Member

Re: HP DVD writer 840b

After 3 months of waiting for an easy fix to appear -- today I bit the bullet and did the "destructive reformat" of my C: drive that HP told me to do. Unfortunately, as with the others in this forum -- this did not solve the problem. With only days left on my warranty now, I have been told that they will send me a new drive. I have requested the Toshiba-Samsung drive -- but we'll see what they send to me. I'll post the outcome in a few days. Now I get to spend the next several days reloading all of my software ......
Brian Lessard
New Member

Re: HP DVD writer 840b

I received my new DVD / CD Drive -- and guess what? IT WORKS! The new drive is the Toshiba Samsung drive mentioned by the other person on this link: model TS-H652, manufactured October 2006.

If this sad story isn't bad enough -- when reinstalling the software I had a problem setting up a "non-administrator" account. I kept getting an error because "in order for MyGamesTM to" I needed to cause this account to be an Adminstrator account. Well, I didn't want MyGames to run but couldn't figure out how to solve it -- so I called HP Tech Support. Can anyone guess what their solution was? TO REFORMAT THE HARD DRIVE! I told them they were nuts and argued with them for an hour before relenting. Now on my last day of my warranty -- I wanted this fixed. So I tossed 3 days of rebuilding the software on the machine and reformatted the machine. SAME PROBLEM. Oh -- and the beauty of this is that they don't want to stay on the line while the machine is reformatting. They want you to call back and let you explain the issue to a new person so that they don't have to take responsibility for their bad advice. But an amazing thing happenend -- it was the last day of my warranty and this person is apparently well-compensated for selling an extended warranty. For the entire 35 minutes that the reformat took -- she stayed on the line trying to sell me a $129 1-year extension to my service contrat. I kept telling her that the reformat would not solve my problem. It did not.

After a brief pause she told me to run MSCONFIG and to uncheck all of the boxes that had the background crap running on the machine. THAT solved the problem and THAT could have been done without another reformat!

Sorry about the Rant. I am still in the process of putting my PC software back together. At least my DVD and CD functions now work. But did it have to be this difficult. A hard drive reformat should be the LAST option -- not the FIRST option. I wonder how many people decide that they can just live with the problems because they don't want to go through the pain of rebuilding their software?

Oh -- and her last words to me after finally solving the problem using MSCONFIG: "are you sure that you don't want to extend your warranty?" Needless to say, I did not.
Darin R Johnson
New Member

Re: HP DVD writer 840b

Same problem. Has anyone had any luck with them just sending out a new burner? This is a joke and looks like should be a recall. With this many people having issues there should be something standard that should be done. Reformating the hard drive is the biggest joke I have heard of. Any one know of a phone number or process that you can go through to get this handled. Making it the customers problem is not the way it should go IMO. This should just be a recall on this burner. If it was isolated...ok. This is hardly isolated. Look around the internet with all the problems.
Richard M Anderson
New Member

Re: HP DVD writer 840b

I have the same problem! After using Lighscribe for the first time, the 840b drive no longer burns or reads dvd's. I've tried everything.
Josh.Davis
New Member

Re: HP DVD writer 840b

I have a folder on my computer with firmware for 840b writer. I had same problem and did some research and found a combination of firmware items that make my DVD writer work again. If anyone knows a way to upload them on this site, or if HP wants a copy of the folder to put on their website for firmware please let me know. its about 600mb zipped .
misocatharsis
New Member

Re: HP DVD writer 840b

hey josh, if you wouldn't mind uploading it to a file sharing site, that would probably work the best, as the attachement size is limited here to 1mb. do you mean you downgraded the firmware, or what did you end up doing? thats a big file for firmware. just curious. i'm actually not using that computer anymore, but i'd still like to get it fixed. so if you could find a site, or maybe put it in a torrent and post a link to it here, that'd be amazing. i won't be able to check right away, but if someone else could? thanks again, i'd love to get it working again.
Don Ruddle
New Member

Re: HP DVD writer 840b

Did anybody ever find what file Josh was talking about. I have the 840b writer and My DVD's just copy 10 percent of the time. I purchased a "Plextor PX-810SA" DVD Drive to replace the 840b, but if I could get it working again that would be great. I havn't recvd the new one yet so I don't know if that will solve my problem or not. I have a hunch that it will be fixed though.
Don Ruddle
New Member

Re: HP DVD writer 840b

Did anybody ever find what file Josh was talking about? I have the 840b writer and My DVD's just copy 10 percent of the time. I purchased a "Plextor PX-810SA" DVD Drive to replace the 840b, but if I could get it working again that would be great. I havn't recvd the new one yet so I don't know if that will solve my problem or not. I have a hunch that it will though. I still would like to try to fix it.