HELP! Sony DRU-500AX damaging Ritek DVD-RW media?

[kaulike]

I just received my first "real" batch of DVD media from rima.com. After much research it seemed to me that Ritek G03 media was best for -R archival storage of my home movies, and while I was at it I bought 20 Ritek DVD-RWs as well, for $1.81 apiece.

Well---the DVD-Rs are fantastic, but I have burned 4 of the DVD-RWs thus far and ended up with 4 coasters. RW coasters indeed! I can't even reformat them and try again. They format fine at the beginning, and will hold a gig or two, but as I reach the outer edge---maybe around 3.5GB---I get a message saying the disk is full and that there was a problem with writing. Of course this is after rebooting to start fresh, turning off the virus checker, and doing nothing else on the machine for an hour.

Ejecting and reinserting shows a blank disk (after writing for an hour!) . Reformatting the disk immediately yields a message that the media is damaged.

I should also note that this burner has NEVER yet made me a coaster, after burning a dozen or more DVDs and probably two dozen CDs for backups.

Before I call rima.com to complain, could someone tell me---did I get a bad batch? I thought the Ritek media was solid stuff.

Machine stats:
HP Vectra 1.4GHz Pentium IV, 512MB DDR RAM
Sony DRU-500AX, about 6 months old
formatted with DLA (drive letter access) active
OS: Windows 2000 Pro, DMA active

Software:
attempted copying to the drive letter, also attempted
using Veritas RecordNow DX that came with the drive

Media stats:
Ritek DVD-RW, silver top

any help is greatly appreciated!

thanks

Jeff

UPDATE at 2am:

I rechecked www.rima.com's product description on my Ritek DVD-RW media, and I see the notice that says "not compatible with DVD+RW drives." I read this before I bought the media, but I discounted it, thinking that my Sony is multi-format and supports DVD-RW as well as DVD+RW.

However, looking at the compatibility charts again (on Ritek's site) I notice that my Sony drive shows up under the "drive" section but not under the "recorder" section. I guess that means I purchased a bunch of incompatible media.

The product description for Ritek DVD+RW media states that it works with my drive. I wish I had purchased that in the first place!

By the way, my order from rima.com got here a day EARLY and was extremely well packed. Assuming everything goes well returning the incompatible media, I will buy from them again (tomorrow in fact).

[StudeBarc]

kaulike,

I have experienced very similar issues on +RW media and a Ricoh MP5125. Formatting and burning of +RW's was impossible. The culprit boiled down to Record Now Max 4.5 DLA software. After uninstalling DLA all problems vanished. Your Sony Burner will operate fine with the Media you are using, I have no doubt. Get rid of DLA and see how it goes. Normal procedures for burning RW's with DVD-Video should apply.

Regards
Studebarc. 8)

[kaulike]

Thanks for the reply. I also suspect DLA---in fact I wrote one of the disks using Veritas RecordNow and specifically did not format it with DLA, but there was no difference.

The folks at rima.com confirmed this morning what I wrote earlier, and have said they will make an effort to make it more clear which media are supported on which drives. Too bad more resellers aren't as responsive. Also too bad I burned up 4 of these things figuring it out.

At this point they are going to take back the remaining discs and give me credit, and I'm going to buy some +RW disks that I know will work, having used them before. My penalty will be the shipping cost plus about $8 for the media, not an expensive lesson. I would rather do that than jump through too many hoops to make this stuff work. I have grown rather fond of DLA, and tend to think of RW disks as small hard drive extensions. Funny, as I couldn't stand using DirectCD for the same thing.

However, I will definitely remember your story and will remove DLA if any further problems appear.

thanks again

Jeff