LightScribe Drive/Device "Not Found"

My problem is with my Lightscribe drive. Yes, I know there are threads elsewhere dealing with the drives, but I'm in a bit of an unusual situation, very similar to this one, but not exactly.

My drive is NOT recognized as a Lightscribe drive. More accurately, all of my labeling software (Sure Thing, Roxio, Lightscribe, Essentials, etc.) all report the same thing - "no Lightscribe device/drive found". They lie! :-)

Up until as recently as 3 weeks ago, the drive was working fine. Then, a few days ago, right after Windows sent out all of those updates in one day (about 15 on the 10th of December), I tried to make a label and it said "Lightscribe device not found".

I went the HP Tech Support route and the Windows support route (still in progress there). Tried everything that I could come up with and no joy. Here's the list so far:

Reboot - nothing
Restore point - no change
Registry Edit, delete upper/lower limits - no change
Updated driver -no change
Static Electric release - useless
Uninstalled/reinstalled in DM (no errors found, no "troubleshoot" option in Properties, device reported as "working properly" - no change
Tried it in Safe Mode - drive still not found
Tried New User Account, clean boot, etc. -no change
Used Recovery Console to reinstall Lightscribe Host Software - no change
Physically replaced drive with new one - no change
Repeated all of the above with new drive - no fix

The drive works well in ALL aspects, EXCEPT as a Lightscribe drive. Reads, burns, etc. No problem. Just seems to be set on denying it's ethnicity as a Lightscribe drive. It is a Super Multi RW CD/DVD Dl Lightscribe optical drive (TSSTcorp CDDVDW TS-L632N ATA Device). This is an HP DV9500 CTO running Vista Ultimate 32 bit.

Details: HP Pavilion DV9500 CTO,
Intel® Core™2 Duo CPU T7500 @ 2.2 GHz, L1 -64, L2-4096
System Board Quanta 30CB Version 79.26
BIOS F.58, RD 06/2008
RAM: 4 GB installed
Graphics & Display: NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GS
Hard Drives: Samsung HM121HII, IDE, 111.79 GB times TWO
DVDRAM GSA-T20L by HL-DT-ST, firmware NC08
LAN: Ethernet, 100 Mbps, Realtek RTL8168B/8111B Family PCI-E Gigabit

The system is certified clean and virus free. Operates OK otherwise. No hardware/software changes associated with the failure of the drive. Still under extended warranty BUT I do NOT want to do a complete destructive reset as I have about $6K in third party apps that I can not get all back.

Anyone have a fix or idea where to look for one?:D

GWoolf

GWoolf said:

Reboot - nothing
Restore point - no change
Registry Edit, delete upper/lower limits - no change
Updated driver -no change
Static Electric release - useless
Uninstalled/reinstalled in DM (no errors found, no "troubleshoot" option in Properties, device reported as "working properly" - no change
Tried it in Safe Mode - drive still not found
Tried New User Account, clean boot, etc. -no change
Used Recovery Console to reinstall Lightscribe Host Software - no change
Physically replaced drive with new one - no change
Repeated all of the above with new drive - no fix



GWoolf

Click to expand...

Have you tried uninstalling the updates and then uninstalling/reinstalling the drivers?
That would probably eliminate the updates as suspect if it works. I have lightscribe and the updates did nothing to it/ still works.
Man, all that software and no recent complete pc backups?

I did restores back as far as I had points, but no fix. Back up files no good unless I know WHICH file to restore. There are too many suspected updates to remove and several are listed as critical. Nor sure if that is the cause, but the timing is very suggestive.

Well, I meant if you made a complete backup to disks using Complete Backup and Restore Center in Ultimate or another third party app. I would suggest you make a backup to disk or external HDD before anything else goes wrong.

You could just uninstall all the updates from three weeks ago till now for a test, just to see if they're causing the problem. Sounds like a physical problem with the drive though. Try the device on another computer and see if it works or take it back to the manufacturer to be tested.

Airbot said:

Well, I meant if you made a complete backup to disks using Complete Backup and Restore Center in Ultimate or another third party app. I would suggest you make a backup to disk or external HDD before anything else goes wrong.

You could just uninstall all the updates from three weeks ago till now for a test, just to see if they're causing the problem. Sounds like a physical problem with the drive though. Try the device on another computer and see if it works or take it back to the manufacturer to be tested.

Click to expand...

Sorry, you missed part of my post. NOT A PHYSICAL PROBLEM. That's exactly what I first thought also, BUT I replaced the old drive with a brand new one. No change. So the hardware is not the issue. Has to be something in the software. I suspect it's a registry entry or a driver somewhere in the ATA controller cards since the drive does everything ELSE it's suppose to do.

I do HAVE both Recovery Disks and a Recovery Console. Used the Console to reinstall original LightScribe Host software - no luck. Other than a complete disk wipe and reinstall there is not much left in the recovery options and there is no guarantee that will fix the issue. and it WILL destroy all of my current 3rd party after-market apps and software and all of my data. Not ready to do that. I HAVE already created both a recovery set of disk as well as the partition AND I have made a mirror backup. But without know what to use them to restore what/when or where, they are pretty useless in this situation.

If I did a destructive recovery/reinstall I'd lose some irrepalcable software, months of works, and I would have to spend about a week or two reloading and reconfiguring everything back to present settings. Not worth it just to burn a label.

In the timeframe of when this may have started (I only noticed it 3 weeks ago but I had not had occassion to burn a label for a couple months) there are 64 general Windows Updates and Hot Fixes. Gone over them and looked at details - nothing jumps oiut as obviously effecting the optical drive.

At this point, rather than reformatting the drive and reinstalling the OS to out-of-the-box, factory settings (which may NOT fix it) and destroying my months of work, I may just have to live with out a LightScribe drive. It is nice to have, but I can always still go back to using paper labels or my good old reliable disk label marker mark IA - my Sharpie!!

Glad you got it fixed gwoolf. I didn't even know there was a lightscribe forum. Sometimes the answer's so simple that it gets overlooked. Wonder how it got set to manual though.

GWoolf said:

Blame me and Microsoft! I ran one of those Vista tweaker programs that's supposed to speed thngs up. I suspect it turned off a number of things in the interest of speed. Big mistake. I am now reviewing the list and seeing what else it might have decided I don't need! :-)

Click to expand...

Yeah, there you go. Those programs like to "optimize" things that it thinks are bad and necessarily won't tell you about it.