dvd drive burns dvd's but not cd's

Hello everybody! I have an inspiron e1505 and for some reason it no longer burns to cd's, but still burns dvd's. When I try to burn either files or mp3's to a cd, it burns and says "burn process completed successfully" but the cd is blank... But as I said it still burns dvd's correctly, the problem is just with cd's. I've tried several different brands of cd's but only rarely will it burn properly, 98% of the time the cd is blank after my computer says the burn process has completed successfully. I use nero 8 ultra as my program, and I also have sonic myDVD LE too, but neither will create a burned cd, it's always blank when done. My dvd drive is a TSST TS-L632D... Any suggestions on this? Thanks in advance!!! Oh yeah my laptop is running win xp media center

 

2 thoughts:

1. When you say the disc is blank, do you mean there is nothing written at all or has the disc not finalized properly so the data can't be read.

2. Can you cadge an external writer to see if the problem happens with that too?

 

Thanks for responding, when i say the disk is blank I say because when i put the disk in my laptop after i burn the files to it, my DVD drive says "blank disk".. and i can put it in my drive and try to burn the same files to it again and sometimes it will, but most of the time the drive just tries to read the disk endlessly and nothing ever comes up showing in my computer, and after a while I have to push the eject button to get my laptop to stop trying to read the disk. Unfortunately I don't have an external usb DVD drive to try it out, but I was planning to buy a new replacement drive to to replace this one, but wanted to see if anyone here ever had this same problem and what they did to fix it. I've contacted DELL and of course they want to get me over to a software specialist for $125.00 (which unfortunately I can't afford) before they will issue me a warranty replacement when I can buy a new drive of the same model I have in my computer for less than half that...

 

Ok, update. I found that if I try and burn a cd right after I boot up my computer, it'll burn correctly, but if I try to burn another cd after the first one then I get a burn process completed successfully, but when the disk verification starts, I get a disk verification failed because of too many errors. If I reboot my computer and try to burn the files again to another blank cd, then the burn process completes, and the verification also completes successfully...

 

Most likely a software problem then.
What happens if you use CD/DVD writing software like ImgBurn?

Michael

 

Thank you Michael for responding! I downloaded and tried the newest version of imgburn and it does the same thing as Roxio, and nero does, when i burn the first cd it completes and verifies successfully, but when i try to burn another disk, then it doesn't verify successfully and when i put it in another cd player, it reads as a blank disk, as long as i reboot my computer before i try to burn a cd, it does it successfully, and as I said before it burns DVD's properly every time, the problem occurs when i try to burn CD's only...

 

also i don't know if this is part of the problem but I have my drive flashed with the latest DE04 flash (2007) from DELL, but when i go to device manager and click on the driver on my drive it says it's from 7/1/2001, and when i click update driver it says it's already using the best driver available, i can't believe a 9 year old driver is the best available, but i've tried to find a newer one,but all i can find anywhere is the DE04 flash which it already has...

 

Hi,

Is there any hint in the log file displayed in ImgBurn? That might give some hint. Perhaps you can post the log file?

I am still guessing that some software is interfering (famous: DRM and copy protection stuff from games, music or video discs).

Somewhat tricky, but extremely helpful to sort out Windows related issues, but you need to be able to boot from USB devices (check Bios settings for that):
Get the Ubuntu CD ISO image and burn to CD-R. Also get an empty USB stick (should have 2GB capacity). Boot your laptop from that CD (select "I want to test" if prompted) and locate the "Create Startup Media" application in "System administration" (I have German language settings here, so the menu entries might be different from what I guessed here) menu. Follow the instructions to have your USB drive prepared.
Then shut down your computer and remove the CD. Reboot your computer from the USB drive (press F12 for the boot menu, or modify boot settings in Bios). In Ubuntu's applications menu, you'll find CD/DVD burning software. Now waste a few blank CD-R in order to see if there is the same problem.

Okay. Well, these are totally different things. What you download from Dell was the firmware of your optical drive. It is like a Bios.
Windows property tab shows the driver version. Since drivers for optical drives are part of the operating system, you are indeed shown a driver date from 2001. There are no other drivers needed and thus such do not exist.

Another question: What is the MID of your blank CD-R, and what brand? ImgBurn tells you the MID.

Michael