Help With NEC 3550-A DVD Drive

I recently purchased and installed an NEC 3550-A DVD drive. The install went without a hitch - the physical installation that is. Here are my gremlins:

It reads CD's fine. However, when I put in a DVD, in this case a Memorex DVD-R I get the autoplay message that prompts me in regards to burning a CD using my installed media programs such as Rhapsody, Napster, Mediaplayer, etc. This is odd - as I inserted a DVD disc. Additionally, the drive is listed as a CD when I place a DVD in the drive. When the drive is empty it is listed as a DVD drive. However, when I insert a DVD disc Windows recognizes the disc title but will not open it. Also, when I try to copy files to the DVD I get an error message saying Windows has encountered a problem while copying to this disc. When I turned on the computer for the first time after installing the drive Windows recognized the drive and installed the software for it.

So - can anyone help? I am pretty sure firmware is not the issue. I will do that as a last resort.

Any ideas?

Maybe the kind Geeks who helped me select the drive could lend a hand. I jokingly told them I would be back if things got ugly!

Thanks in advance.


* Update * I went ahead and updated fimware from 1.05 - 1.06. Same problem. *

 

Following up myself here -

I am starting to think that it could be a software issue. I purchased the drive OEM sans software. As it is I have no DVD decoding software on my computer. That explains my inability to play a movie DVD. However, I am still perplexed why I cannot read/write/copy DVD files (pics mainly). Does that require specific software as well?

This is all new to me. I do have a DVD player on my laptop but that had everything installed and I never gave it a thought. My desktop, until last night, only had a CD drive which I replaced with the NEC drive.

Thanks in advance for any info.

 

I've never burned a DVD so I can't say anything about that. I just stuck a DVD-R that a friend made while on vacation into my NEC 3550 A and the autoplay popup (in Vista) let me choose open with Windows Media Player and the DVD worked great.

Does XP handle burning DVDs? I think the Nero Express that came with the drive will do that but I didn't think XP would. I am not too experienced at burning things except photos to CD-- the 3550 A has excelled at that. I put one in my wife's computer also.