My optical drive seems to be making a burning smell while it is trying to read a dvd that i just wrote. Dvds are also taking a long time to run. From the time i put them in to the time the autorun screen pops up. Though Dvds i burned this morning are working fine and starting up fast. What could have happened in that short time? I just rebooted my computer today, and i haven't done so in about a 4 days. I usually close it when i'm done but this week i was using it a lot. Anyways, could something have changed in that short time with the way the optical drive writes DVDs? I am backing my games up by the way.

Edit: Could it be from Securom or something other form of DRM? I heard they sometimes mess with Optical Drives.

Your DVD could be the problem, and not the DVD drive. SInce other DVDs work fine I think that's pretty likely. Could you burn another DVD and see if that one also has problems?

It could be DRM - I had StarForce make a DVD burner totally useless, which was when I started paying attention to DRM. That just stopped my computer from seeing the DVD drive period, though.

Your DVD drive could just be breaking down, or getting overheated, especially if you started using it a lot more recently. The burning smell could be dust getting caught in the laser. Have you tried dusting your computer area, blowing our your case with canned air, making sure the airflow in the case is good, etc? Please remember to totally unplug your PC before doing that though, otherwise worse things happen. :)

That's kind of overkill. Maybe, depending on a lot of things, that might help. Or it might not (didn't with me - the drive was just toasted), and you might have just nuked your PC for no reason, lost an afternoon to re-installing everything, and *still* have the problem.

Right now it's not even clear from your posts if the problem is the DVD drive or something else nearby, like dust in the laser (would cause a burning smell and read errors) or with that specific DVD (bad DVDs cause read errors, the drive tries over and over and overheats, is slow), or a cable could be loose, or ... there's lots of options that are kind of hard to diagnose over forum postings.

I'd try dusting out the PC (look up how to do this - canned air *not a vacuum or duster*, make sure you're grounded, etc) and making sure cables are connected fully, then burning a different DVD and seeing if that had the problem. If it's fixed, great. If not, you're out the cost of a DVD and a can of air (<$10 at local hardware or electronics store).