On the main family PC here the DVD drive has stopped working. It's been like this for about 2 years. Now my mum has her new laptop I feel a bit better messing around with this thing, so I may as well fix it in time for Windows 7 (it's had a constant installation of XP for almost 5 years - it's not healthy).
It's apparently documented that SecuROM can cause a DVD drive to break - can anyone here confirm this? I honestly can't see any other reason why it would just break like it did.
Here's what happened to it:
It died quite slowly and painfully, first of all it stopped reading DVDs a temporary fix was reinstalling the driver, this worked for about a week and then DVDs stopped working again. Reinstalling the driver did not help. Soon after that it stopped writing CDs and then stopped reading CDs. Now it simply does nothing. Putting in any kind of D will cause it to just sit there for a while and make a few noises. Attempting to open D:\ from My Computer makes Explorer crash.
Another thing to note is that I can't boot into any CDs, so it could well be a hardware problem.
Odd place to ask but I figure one of you will know.

There have been a few DRM systems that will step down the read speed on CD and DVD drives, most notably older versions of Starforce. Over time with repeated decreases in read speed this will result in the drive having more errors reading and writing to media, and eventually the drive will completely stop working. I've come across a few scattered reports that Securom can cause this to happen, but nothing definitive. Ultimately I'd consider Securom damaging DVD drives to be possible, but highly improbable.

Just checked. An old Starforce is there too, I wonder if it's possible they gangraped it?
You know the odd thing is... It's a Sony drive.

There is no conclusive evidence that SecuROM does anything to CD/DVD ROM drives, since it doesn't really operate as a driver layer in between your system and the CD/DVD ROM driver like Starforce does. Speaking from personal experience, Starforce can and will mess up certain drives, regardless of manufacturer. If you are having a drive problem and it is caused by copy protection, it is far more likely that Starforce is at fault than SecuROM.
Then again, it could just be a bad drive that crapped out for reasons completely unrelated to copy protection.

Can you prove it?

There's actually been a few reports I've come across that having 2 or more of some DRM schemes (Starforce, Securom, Safedisc, TAGES) significantly increases the chances of problems with CD/DVD drives. Again, I can't say whether these reports are accurate, but it is something to take into consideration.

I have two "bricked" drives in my parts box right now, of identical manufacturer (Lite-On), that both went tits up after installing and running a Starforce protected game. I installed a third replacement drive (also identical), then installed that game and cracked it to remove Starforce and that drive is still working today (several years later). The odds that I managed to buy three identical drives and two of them were crap are pretty low and the fact that both the bad ones only crapped out after installing and using a Starforce protected game is too big of a coincidence to not attribute it to that particular copy protection scheme.

Sounds good. :)

At the time, I did not have another machine available to test the drives, but I probably do now (I have a lot of parts lying around). I may have to give that a shot, if only just to see if I have a couple of good drives to add to the "working" pile of parts.

Let me know what happens ;)

My parents were killed by the SecuROM protection.

I've had a Lite-On drive go tits up after reading a homemade data backup DVD, from what I can gather from the net and other people I know who've used them, lite on drives are generally pretty unreliable
TheJoe, if the drive still registers as active hardware and isn't just a brick, you might want to have a look around for a firmware upgrade, even if its one of those shockingly illegal ones that removes the "100% effective in stopping piracy and importing" region codes

That could be, but a failure rate so high that two out of the three identical drives I bought were crap? I find that very hard to believe, especially when I still have the one that didn't crap out working fine today and has worked fine for years, no matter what disk type I use in it, which was also true of the other drives, prior to installing a Starforce protected game. I still won't risk installing a Starforce protected game on that machine though. Even if the drive is crap, it appears that it is something about Starforce that brings that crap out in the drive, which I really blame on Starforce, not Lite-On, at this point.

I have never seen a single report of hardware being damaged by SecuROM that can be 100% verified. No one claiming as such has, when asked, been able to actually prove the source of such failures to be SecuROM --- and I've asked a lot of people.
From personal experience, I would say that SecuROM is very unlikely to damage hardware -- it has certainly never damaged any of mine.
But then again, the same people who claim it caused such damage tend to be the ones that swear blind that you can never remove it from your PC (and that is a proven lie).
StarForce is another matter, however. I do recall the company that makes it offering up a substantial reward for anyone who could actually prove it caused damage -- they claim that no one ever managed to. But then, the terms for handing out that reward and the time limit given were a little questionable.
And the fact that they have since changed how StarForce works could be seen as either an admission of previous problems, or an attempt to clear their bad name so as to re-penetrate the market (after sticking primarily to Russia for a few years).