techie CD rom replacement Q

A customer has presented me with an interesting repair job… a CD duplicator unit. Kinda an odd machine, all eprom based from the looks of it, controls are just a small liquid crystal display on the front of the case.

Two drives have gone out and he wants them replaced. Looks like pretty standard LITE-ON 52x32x52 IDE CDRW see here

Barring an incorrect jumper setting is there any reason that anyone can think of that this thing wouldn’t work with pretty much any identical speed same interface drive. I swapped out a drive and the drive seems to be able to serve as a source drive…cd plays ok in computer, but I am getting errors if i try to write to the drive or verify anything.

I am not a techie, per se, so this is just a way out there WAG, but could it be an encoding type error? I know I have had CDs burned in Europe that only worked on a very few PCs and showed up as blank on all others. Could it be that the EPROM is hard-coded to only write in a specific scheme and the newer drives don’t recognize it as valid?

You may ignore this if it is stupid.