DVD burner will not recognize blank DVDs

Sat May 23, 2009 12:11 am

DVD burner will not recognize blank DVDs

I have a problem with my PC that's interfering with my ability to edit my photos. The first symptom I noticed was a streak that would shoot across the monitor horizontally. Soon the monitor began to blink off and on and eventually all the programs running would freeze until a manual restart. My son set the display's hardware acceleration to "None". This fixed the streak, freezing and blinking problems.

But now my photos look wrong. Adobe has a program for adjusting the monitor, Adobe Gamma, but the adjustments won't work with hardware acceleration set to "None". So, he and I assume I'm due for a new video card. Does that seem correct? And let me tell you, it's a PITA having photos printed when you're not sure about your monitor's settings.

While I'm on the subject I may as well ask about the other problem which also affects the photography. My DVD burner will not recognize blank DVDs. I have around 4 gigs of photos that I've not been able to back up because of this. I can burn CDs but not DVDs. I've uninstalled and reinstalled Nero but with no effect. I tell Nero what to burn and it opens the loaded disk tray and tells me to place a recordable DVD in the drive. I have no idea if this is a software or hardware problem. I mean it reads and burns CDs, so does the burner use separate optical devices for the different disk types? If so, could the DVD device have dust on it? Thanks ahead of time, oh PC gurus.

Sat May 23, 2009 1:27 am

I had the same sort of problems with Nero.

I uninstalled it and use Roxio, generally no problems. Not much help I know but that was my solution.

Sat May 23, 2009 3:04 am

Thanks, but I don't think the problem is Nero. IIRC, I tried using Windows ( I read one could just drag files to the DVD drive icon for burning) but it would only recognize blank CDs. In fact Windows told me, after I had inserted a DVD and drug files to the drive, to insert a blank CD. It's as if unwritten DVDs are invisible to my computer. DVDs with data will play though. This is very weird.

Sat May 23, 2009 9:39 pm

It's been awhile since I played with drive lasers, but I think they're seperate... one for DVDs and one for CDs... it could just be the DVD laser is rubbish.

Sun May 24, 2009 4:04 am

If you're right about the two lasers, you're probably correct about the DVD laser being broken. I might try using canned air to blow into the drive, but I think a trip to Intrex is in my recent future.

Tue May 26, 2009 12:06 am

The problem with the DVD burner was the hardware. I bought and installed a new Sony from Intrex and am now archiving 12 gigs of photos. By the way, I cracked open the old drive and saw only one lens. So, I suppose only one laser does all the work.

As for the other problem, I have a video card ordered from B and H Photo- Video, a great place to buy camera equipment. I was surprised they had video cards. They were one of the first Google results for my specific AGP card. I wanted to upgrade from 128mb to 256 or better, but my power supply is too puny for anything larger. Oh well, in a year or two maybe I can do a complete upgrade, beginning with the mother board.