posted
I seem to be having troubles with my burner. I have a Toshiba ODD-DVD SD-R5272 DVD/CD combination burner. Of late I have been trying to burn video and data to DVD. I have a brand-new spindle of DVDs and Nero keeps refusing to burn to certain disks (saying the disk is not empty for video and not showing the burn button at all for data). I had a stack of 6 discs, of which 1 Nero would burn to. I'm presently downloading another DVD burning program to see if the problem is with Nero.
Possibly related to this is odd behaviour by the drive. When there is no disk in the drive, it will open an empty folder if I open it in My Computer instead of the "Please insert disk into drive X:" prompt. Also, whenever I open or close the drive, the Windows Installer box will pop up and the progress bar will fill and then it will disappear.
Does anyone have any idea what the hell is going on?!
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Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
There's this thing that I don't entirely understand with the disc-writing software these days (why in my day we didn't have your fancy tray-loaders, we had to load our blanks into cartridges!) where it creates a drive image (on the desktop, in My Documents, somewhere, your results may vary) which at some later point it assumes you will tell it to actually burn to disc.
This has the advantage that until you burn it, this directory will behave exactly like a hard drive (which makes sense considering that it is) in that you can add files, remove files, rename files, do all the things one expects. And then it expects you will burn it and its will be like frozen in time.
But it's confusing because the user thinks they have a disc even when it's never been burned, or they expect to drag things into a program and arrange their files there and not in their OS. So that might be part of it.
As to the media, I don't know why it would be an intermitent problem unless it's faulty media (or media to which stuff had previously been written). Another thing to watch is that there are commercially available "blank" media for standalone audio CD burners and (I expect) DVD burners. This media is not actually blank and usually has some lead-in control data pre-recorded to format it properly with the appliance. What you really want is blank data media as that's what your computer will be expecting.
None of which may help at all, but might be of general interest.
Registered: Sep 2000
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posted
I'm going to toss this question out there, too, since we talking about burners. I have a desktop with a CD-R, and I think it has a 48x write speed. I know it worked fine when I had 48x CDs to burn to. It's been a while since I had used it (maybe six to eight months). I bought a new spindle of CDs that are 52x, but the CD-R won't write to them. It stalls out in the middle of the write session. I haven't found any 48x CDs to toss in there to see if the CD-R will write to them.
What do y'all think? Is this a problem with the media, or do y'all think it's a hardware or software issue? The computer runs XP Home, and I tried using both Roxio Easy CD Creator and Windows' CD burning utility. This is my mom's computer, it has a lot of crap on it, and is a Gateway.
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Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
Some time after I got my new HP the burner stopped working- it could read/write DVDs, but couldn't recognize any CDs- it'd do the "please insert a disk" thing too... so I used the handy dandy talk to an HP person on the computer chat thing... and they went though things, and said that CD's by a list of companies weren't as good as this other list- so try those... after that didn't work, they sent me a new burner because they declared it defective- and the new one has been happy. So quite possibly yours up and went flippy. Siegfried- I'd certainly try the first disks you used, but 52x shouldn't cause that type of problem. I would also guess that it is not a software issue, if it suddenly seemed to break, and you have not changed the drivers or such for the burner.
Registered: Dec 2005
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Topher : Do you have access to another burner, so you can test the discs? Because, if it's specific discs that won't work, you may, as has been mentioned, have just gotten a bad batch.
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
You also might just try burning at a lower speed, Siegfried. I remember there was something sneaky about a physical difference between, like, 4X and the 12-350X (or whatever it is now) Hi-Speed� discs such that 4X burners couldn't use 12X media. (Which seems lame to me) I got a bunch of free higher speed discs when my father realized this. I dunno if it's the same thing though.
Registered: Sep 2000
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quote:Siegfried- I'd certainly try the first disks you used, but 52x shouldn't cause that type of problem. I would also guess that it is not a software issue, if it suddenly seemed to break, and you have not changed the drivers or such for the burner.
Well, it wasn't all of a sudden. There was a gap of about six to eight months from the time I last used it to just recently. It's my mom's computer, and she's likes to download lots of little games (some loaded with spyware, apparently) and such. If I still had any blank 48x CDs to try, I would. I haven't looked everywhere, but most of the places near me that stock blank CDs (Wal-Mart, Office Depot, Best Buy, etc.) usually only have the 52x. I have another laptop, though, that has a burner that handles the 52x CDs just fine, so my supply isn't going to waste.
quote:You also might just try burning at a lower speed, Siegfried.
I did try doing this. The Easy CD Creator program gives me an option on the write speed (with a max of 48x). I tried a lot of the slower options, and I had the same problem: about a third to halfway through the write session the write speed would drive to 1x or 2x and then abort with errors. Using Windows, I never saw an option for adjusting the write speed, but it still just ate discs and threw up errors.
Registered: Mar 1999
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The only other DVD burner I have access to is on my dad's computer, and I don't know when I'll be going home next. So, that doesn't really help me any.
But that still doesn't explain Windows' odd behaviour.
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Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
The Windows Installer bit went away; it was due to an unfinished installation when I dismounted an installer disk image.
I've tried to burn a data disc and both times it aborted at 62%. I checked the error messages this time and it said "Illegal Disc" and "Could not perfom end of Disc-at-once". Mayhaps my drive is dying?
-------------------- I haul cardboard and cardboard accessories
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
Sieg, I'd say that since it's your mom's computer and she may have all the little spyware bits on it, some little program or two or three is running in the background and actually interfering with the burning process. It may be causing buffer underruns in which you will get errors. Clean up her computer, tell her not to download anything without your approval and try burning a disc again. When you're burning a disc it's best not to have any programs running other than your burning program. Then make sure the screensaver will never start and that the computer won't go down into a "sleep" mode.
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Registered: Feb 2000
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