ordered a sony dvd rw dw-d22a drive to back up some dvds and burn audio. I have had the drive for about 3 weeks now and it is very inconsistent. It burns audio cds fine and will play and read all the dvd r media i have tried. The strange part is that it plays certain commercial dvds but others I have no luck with. I flashed it to a Lite on dvdrw sohw-16335 because it is the same as my sony drive, its just my sony is a oem. I had a ati dvd decoder installed and that wont work and I have nero also, what do you think my problem is? I want to back up some dvds of mine and burn some dual layer disks. I really need help! Or else this drive is going back to new egg. thanks so much for your time

Could someone please help me out

Hi md343

Just browsing through the site and spotted your post.

I built myself a new system recently and used the same Sony drive as you.
I had similar problems, the worst being when I put in a DVD-RW blank the drive made horrible noises as the optical unit thrashed about trying to either read or format the media within.

I got to the point of sending it back but thought I'd read up about flashing the thing. Found various versions of the firmware and tried the standard liteon 1633S as you did. That made things work a bit better but the best result came after I updated Nero.
I read that having loads of different dvd software can cause problems with DVD writers, something to do with library files if I recall right.
Also the media you use is pretty important. I initially used IMATION blanks but found that TDK seemed to work better. That said, since I changed Nero the IMATION blanks work ok too.

It is better if the drive is set to master on the IDE bus.

It might be worth downloading this Sony diagnostic utility from ********sony.storagesupport.com/cdrw/diagnostics.htm which will check your drive.

Hope you get it sorted, I know how frustrating it is when it doesn't work properly.

Cheers

Beaker :)