Dude, what is wrong with my DVD burner drive thingy?

Remove all ads!

My wife has had a successful history of creating DVDs on our computer up until now. Her latest attempt ended in frustration because our DVD rom/burner/frustrator whatever it's called does not recognize that there is a blank DVD in the drive. So no burnination. It used to work and now it doesn't. I can't figure out why because nothing about the computer has really changed since the last time she successfuly burned a DVD.

Any good jumping off points for troubleshooting? I'm not at home right now so I can't provide the specs and all that stuff right now. I can get them if it'd help (which it probably will, huh?).

 

This is not too much helpful, But I just had a similar thing a couple of weeks ago. I inserted a burned DVD into my DVD burner and it just did not read it. So I tried other burned DVD's, both DVD-r and DVD+r and still nothing. Then I tried real retail DVD's and CD's and still nothing. My clever conclusion is that the drive is dead. R.I.P. The annoying part is that the drive is not that old and was not used so much that it should be dead.

So anyway, like Tal said, as a start try reading other disks and see if it will read anything. And do not just wait to see if the auto-load for the disk plays: i.e. the CD player opens up after inserting a music CD. If it does not then Use Windows Explorer to see if you can read the disk contents.

 

If you look at a disk, you can see from if it has been burned. if you see a little colorchange from the center, it was used and can be faulty. Some disks can have a bad track denying acces.

 

In response to your questions, Tal:

I just put a DVD in that I know is blank. The autorun thing came up saying it was a blank disc and I selected to open it as a folder. It says on the left that there are 0 bytes free out of 0 total.

The burner is a Plextor DVDR PX 708A. The program that we use to make the movies also does the burning at it is the Ulead DVD Moviefactory 5. The brand of DVD+R that I'm using is Sony and we have burned that brand successfully before. One part of the problem is that the burning program doesn't recognize that there is a disk in there.

 

I have exactly the same problem. My DVD drive reads things fine, but if you try and put something blank in in order to burn something to it, then it says that there are no valid burnable disks. We've tried every type of blank disc we can find but no go.

 

My brother had this problem with his computer that I built him. I literally tried *everything* to fix it. I ended up reformatting his hard drive and reinstalled XP with SP2, but turned off automatic updates. At that same time, he also switched from Nero to Ashampoo since that's what I use to burn CDs/DVDs.

Last I heard, everything's been working fine.