Computer help forum: DVD drive doesn't recognize blank DVD disc

Two things

1: Optical drives, and especially burners, fail pretty often

2: For a while Dell would ship systems with DVD+R only drives. So, if you have DVD-R (note the - instead of +) media, it won't work in a +R only drive.

First thing I'd do is check whether you have a +R only drive, and if it's a +/-R drive, then it's probably failing and needs to be replaced.

I just did what you said and checked the writing on my disc. it is a DVD-R. Now what am I supposed to do with 50 of these?

Thanks.
C

Early models would fry the laser if the wrong media was inserted. It was not funny that you would warn folk about that but they would try and fry drives anyway.

Almost like putting diesel fuel in your average US Ford truck.
Bob

Running Windows 7 Pro. This problem did NOT occur before I installed these MS updates (KB2729452) (K82760413) (K82737019)(K82729449) (K82719033) (KB890830) (K82687311) (KB2596660) (KB2596848) (K82687307)(K82727528) (K82761451)(K82761226) (K82687404) yesterday. Two things happened. 1) I get the error "Windows can't read the disc in drive X:" on all my DVD/CD drives in Windows Explorer. 2) The autoplay window that used to come up asking what I want to do (burn audio cd, copy files to disc, etc.) no longer comes up. I can copy files to the disc using Roxio and I can create an audio cd using roxio..

The autoplay part clued me in. I went to windows help and typed in autoplay. Went to change autoplay settings and changed the blank cd and dvd settingd from grayed out to ask me every time. and the options came back and when I click on the drive with the blank cd/dvd in windows explorer it asks if I want to use the drive as a cd/dvd drive or like a usb flash drive. One of the fixes above changed the defaults.