DVD burner problem! HELP! This one has me stumped!

Ok, this one has me completely baffled.

I purchased a DVD burner on Ebay recently. (Please, no grief about buying used... I'm on a VERY tight budget!) I installed it and my system recognized it just fine when I rebooted. But here is where the problems started. First of all, the drawer will only open manually using the pinhole release on the front of the drive. Once I got it opened, I was able to burn a movie with no problems and it played fine in my DVD player. Then I tried converting and burning another .avi file and when I got to the "Burn" stage it asked me to insert a disc. There was a brand new Memorex disc in the drive but it would not recognize it.

I should mention that when I installed the drive, it read as "DVD/CD RW Drive" under My Computer. When it started giving me trouble reading the blank disc I checked My Computer again and it's showing as just "CD Drive", basically like a "read only" ROM drive. This has me completely stumped and I hope some of the tech gurus here can help. Ok... here are the specifics...

Pentium 4 3.2 GHz Single core Northwood
Windows XP Home SP3
DVD burner drive; Memorex Model MRX500-L 16X Dual Layer
DVD burning software; ConvertX To DVD

I'm unable to locate any drivers or firmware for the DVD drive, it's supposed to use the Windows generic drivers. Thanks in advance for any advice!

 

Unfortunately, buying a used DVDRW is not really a good idea 'cuz this is an item that most people use until it stops working correctly. It's not something that someone would really simply replace or upgrade; when a friend upgraded to a BluRay drive, he simply added the new drive and kept the the old one since it was still working. Yeah - this doesn't help. Sorry..... try this: go to the Device Manager (right click My Computer > Properties > Hardware > Device Manager), click the little plus sign next to CD/DVD drives, right click the drive and select "Uninstall". Close any open windows and download this ZIP file. You'll have to rename it 'cuz it has an underscore on the end (one of these "_") and won't unzip properly with it after the .ZIP. Unzip it, right click the .REG file and select "merge". Answer "yes" to the security question, then reboot your PC. This obviosuly won't fix the non-working button on the drive, but it might get the drive working again.... good luck!

[dlb]

 

Thanks for the tip and the file! Unfortunately, it didn't solve the problem. I really have no idea what's causing this. Could it be the blank discs I'm using? I'm really at a loss here. Any other ideas? Thanks!

 

Have you left the seller any feedback yet? maybe you should contact them and tell them there is a problem.
Is there anyway you could try it in another machine?