One day it had a lot of trouble reading a disk and I had to abort the process. Then afterwards it refused to detect any discs being inserted, whether CD, DVD, or Blu-Ray. After awhile I gave up trying to get it to work again.
But some time later, out of the blue I tried the drive again and to my surprise it seemed to work completely normally, detecting and fully reading one whole Blu-Ray disk with no trouble at all.
But the very next time I tried using it, it was back to not detecting any discs of any kind, and I have not gotten it to work again since. I've repeatedly tried cleaning it with compressed air, but that doesn't seem to help at all.
Also, after this drive was already giving me trouble I tried upgrading the firmware to 1.34, but it just gave me some sort of error (I forget the exact message) saying in effect that the new firmware could not be written to the drive for some unknown reason. (Yes, I know I do not want the 1.50 firmware or newer.)
Does anyone have any advice on how I can troubleshoot this? I'm running Windows 11, if that matters. If it is probably an issue with the drive's laser, can anyone here recommend a good repair service?
MakeMKV does recognize the drive itself just fine and gives me this info:
Drive Information
OS device name: B:
Manufacturer: PIONEER
Product: BD-RW BDR-209D
Revision: 1.31
Serial number: [redacted]
Firmware date: 2015-05-25
Bus encryption flags: 13
Highest AACS version: 76
LibreDrive Information
Status: Enabled
Drive platform: RS8600
Firmware name: PIONEER BDR-209
Firmware type: Original (unpatched)
Firmware version: 1.31/ID61
DVD all regions: Yes
BD raw data read: Yes
BD raw metadata read: Yes
Unrestricted read speed: Yes
No disc inserted