About 2 months ago I started receiving messages that Nero 8 "Could Not Perform End of Disk at Once" when burning a CD or a DVD.
I went through the gamut of checking my DMA setting (it was OK), I checked my Region setting (it was = 1), I even bought blanks from several manufacturers.
I even cleaned the DVD lens with a CD cleaning disk (the one with brushes). Nothing seemed to help.
I was turning out about 90-95% coasters; it sure sounded like my recorder was at the end of it's life.
Then one day I was ripping a store bought CD using Nero and noticed that at the beginning of the disk, it was reading at 15x, but near the end it slowed down to 1x and even 0x.
Now what I did, I'm sure I'll hear most of you screaming, saying "never, never do this".
Well I reasoned that something was holding back the laser mechanism, kinda like Wyle-E Coyote and a huge rubber band.
First thing I did was to play a CD and skip to the last track, just to move the head the farthest away, then ejected.
I carefully took my WD-40 can (with the red straw) and gave a quick burst to the track the head slides on.
I then tried skipping tracks forward from 1 to the end a few times to distribute the oil.
Now for the acid test, I tried to rip a CD using Nero.
Amazingly after a few minutes, the drive started to pick up speed.
16x, 17x ... 22x and sometimes even 23x.
I then tried a DVD burn, voila, no errors!
So what have I learned from this?
Well only do this if you think your drive is toast and you have no other option. Make sure you know exactly what you are doing and where the laser head is. One random splash of oil in the wrong place could kill the laser.
