How do I get my DVD and CD Drives to write?

February 13, 2006 5:12 PM

My DVD and CD Drives will not recognize or burn blank media, any suggestions?

Running XP Pro using Nero 6 to back up data to DVD+RW. Drives refuse to recognize DVD-R or DVD+RW or any CD media. Tried uninstalling and reinstalling to no avail. Tried removing the upper and lower filters to no avail. Curiously, the internal device that my camera CF media plugged into to read no longer works either.

I long ago punched through the ceiling of my understanding on my way to drool and babble. Any thoughts?

posted by KneeDeep to computers & internet (5 comments total)

Just out of curiosity, you don't happen to have any computer games installed, do you? The reason that I ask: some games come with an anti-piracy software called Starforce that can cause mysterious problems with CD and DVD burners.

To check if you have Starforce on there: go to Control Panel, System, Hardware, Device Manager, then select "show hidden devices" in the view menu and scroll down to non-PnP devices. Look for anything with the word Starforce in it.
posted by selfnoise at 5:25 PM on February 13, 2006

Do your drives still read burned CD/DVDs? I ask because I had a similar issue once where my drives just stopped recognizing anything that wasn't "professionally made", for lack of a better term... it saw no blanks and saw no former blanks.

I think I had Roxio installed and tried to remove it and install Nero 5. Something in XP must not have liked that. This was a long while ago though, and I just ended up formatting my machine after backing up data to a secondary hard drive (it was due for a good formatting anyway). I'm very interested in seeing a REAL fix for this one...
posted by educatedslacker at 6:21 PM on February 13, 2006

1. Try and identify anything that might have been installed recently (besides Nero). I had lots of problems with my optical drive after installing Daemon Tools, and lots of other weird stuff when I first tried out Google Desktop Search. If it's only been a recent problem, you could try doing a system restore and see if you can find out a time when it was working.

2. Try updating the firmware of the drive. One of my drives was being very picky about the types of media it would work with, and updating to the latest firmware version allowed me to use practically any media.
posted by chimmyc at 7:31 PM on February 13, 2006

Boot from a LiveCD (such as Knoppix) and see if you can burn from there. The point of this exercise is to completely isolate any software/driver issues of your current Windows installation.

It could just be that the drive has died. You can get a spiffy modern DVD-RW drive for $35 that is probably a lot faster than the one it's replacing, so I don't see a lot of point in spending too much time on the issue unless you're really hard up for cash.
posted by Rhomboid at 12:02 AM on February 14, 2006

Thanks. No joy so far. The $35 new drive sounds like the most efficient and effective solution. I'm still a bit concerned there is something more sinister at work involving Norton security, time will tell. Thanks for the suggestions.
posted by KneeDeep at 7:48 AM on February 14, 2006