LG GGW-H20L Problem

[jstevenco]

Hi all,

I purchased this drive about 6 weeks ago and installed it about two weeks ago (home improvement projects intruded). In short, the drive reads DVDs just fine, but of the 3 BD's I've tried (Road Warrior, Planet Earth, and Kingdom of Heaven) only the last can be read reliably. By that I mean when I put the disc in that Windows even recognizes it and that I can view the file/folder structure using Explorer. Road Warrior I can infrequently get to load but invariably I'll only see part of the disc contents (e.g., I can look in BDMV and see the STREAMS folder but not see the contents of STREAMS before it "gives up"). Most of the time it won't recognize the disc at all.

I first rented RW from Netflix and got thru about half the movie before it started this behavior, so I thought it might be a bad disc. Went to Costco the next day and got KoH and it plays flawlessly, so I figgered "bad disc was right". I re-ordered RW from Netflix and also purchased PE on the web. None of the discs from PE will load at all (i.e., drive attempts to load for extended period of time then acts as if there's no disc). The replacement disc from Netflix acts as I described in the first paragraph.

I am running a Gigabyte mobo (AMD AM2 with a Dualcore 4000+) with Nvidia 430 chipset which I'd read can be problematic as far as SATA optical drives so I tried the SYBA PCI card as a supplemental controller. Same behavior. I am using the onboard SATA as a RAID so I tried completely disabling RAID (my boot disk is on the onboard IDE). Same behavior. I have an MSI NVidia 8600GTS as the GPU. Cyberlink BD Advisor gives green lights across the board. I am running Vista Home Premium SP1. The LG autoudater autopatched the drives firmware to YL04.

Regardless of what I've tried, KoH still reads and plays flawlessly. What gives?

Is this just a flaky drive or am I missing something?

Thanks in advance,

Steve

[sheedoe]

Hello. I have the same drive but don't have the movies you listed. What software are you using to play those movies? I'm using PowerDVD 8 and so far had no problems playing a blu-ray disc. I suggest you check for any software update for your player.

[jstevenco]

Hi Sheedoe,

Thx for the reply. I am using the latest version of PowerDVD 7.3 Ultra (came with the drive). I believe the issue I am have is more fundamental than just the player software however. Only the Kingdom of Heaven disc is reliably recognized at all by Vista as a valid disc -- the others won't load at all or at best load like a bad disc, that is, incompletely. To clarify, I can completely uninstall all player software and Vista will recognize the KofH disc when I put it in (i.e., let me view all files and folders), but not the other discs. So I'm thinking this is more likely a hardware problem rather than software (unless there is something about BD that I am not understanding).

Cheers,

Steve

[sheedoe]

I see what you mean. Well maybe someone with the same drive and those movies can verify if there's a problem. I just tested a couple of BDs (ID4 and Punisher) and they were "explorable" in windows explorer vista.

[jstevenco]

Hi all,

Just wanted to close out this thread. After some additional testing I came to the conclusion that the problem pretty much had to be the drive. Got hold of LG CS and had about a 10 minute chat with one of their techs summarizing what I'd done. He agreed that it sounded flaky and issued an RMA. It came via email the next day (pre-paid 2nd day Air, returning the same way). Within a week I had the replacement drive and I am happy to report that all is now well! I am one happy camper! Thanks for the great CS LG!

Cheers,

Steve