CD and DVD drives

Hi, I'm fairly new to this site but i got a lot of great protection from it so I thought maybe i'd join. I have two problems that are really frustrating me. One is my computer will not burn CD's. I have a CD-RW drive but every time i try and burn it cancels on me. I used different brands and the same has happened each time. Also, I would like to burn DVD's but my drive is just a DVD drive. It isn't DVD-R or DVD-RW. Is there anyway that i can update that drive and change it to DVD-R? Any help on these topics would be great.

Thanks!!

 

Usually if burning is not working and there is nothing wrong with the drive I would look to the connections inside as well as the jumper settings. With IDE (ribbon connector type) rom-drives you should follow these rules, a master jumpered drive should be connected to the terminating end of the ribbon and a slave jumpered drive goes in the middle. If you have moved your drive inside the case without following these rules you could run into trouble.

You should have a lens cleaning disk to run in your drives at least once a year to clear any dust and dirt that collects in the drive and its a good idea to blow a little compressed (canned) air through the front tray while its open to remove any massive amounts before you run the lens cleaner.

Also, if you go to Control Panel > System > Hardware > Device Manager > DVD/CD-ROM Drives and right click on your cd-rw drive and select "UNINSTALL" and then resart your computer, it will refresh the generic drivers MS uses for all rom drives and can sometimes be used to correct read and write problems.

Then there are the conflicts, too many burning softwares loaded then uninstalled and new stuff put on and uninstalled and try another and the whole time your registry is collecting a bunch of junk entries for apps that are no longer there. Run a decent registry cleaner, ccleaner has one and its free. I like Tuneup Utilities cleaner myself but its not free.

 

OP has an identical thread in the Driver forum http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=167465
I have posted an answer there.....