Sony DVD-RW

One of the optical drives that was removed from the VAIO. It isn't compatible with +RW media -- if I remember correctly -- which is weird since my understanding of Sony is future-proofing (i.e. PlayStation 2), so maybe it was made by a 3rd party under Sony, I don't know.

I don't remember anything about this drive between when I received the VAIO from my parents and yesterday, so I'll just leave it out.

Yesterday, I tried to use it to boot from disk to install openSUSE 13.1 from DVD, but it wouldn't read it. I've tried it in the Dell with same results, though I found that the Parted Magic CD worked just fine. I opened it up and saw nothing wrong (not that it would've solved anything anyway), and at least saw why the thing is heavy -- the inside frame is metal!

Not too long ago, I ran some more tests with it in the Dell and found that it won't read DVDs at all, bootable or not, +R or -R. What I'm thinking is that the laser diode is probably slowly dying (or maybe the lens-focusing mechanism, but I highly doubt that) as I remember the external CD-RW drive I used to have did something similar before it died (it wouldn't burn reliably, then would only read, then stopped reading). So right now, it's only able to read CDs, which is unfortunate since some live distros are barely over 700MB if not about 900MB. While it might be able to burn CDs, but it'd be a bit pointless to.