Trouble reading copied DVD's

[Newbee999]

Hi guys, I'm hoping someone can shed some light on this for me, I'm a complete newbee to dvd burning and have recently purchased a Pioneer DVD-RW DVR-106d firmware 1.08 oem from DABS. I'm running win XP SP1. I'm running the Pioneer on a secondary IDE Channel as the master. I'm currently using a trialware version of Nero 6.

I bought some "recommended" dvd's from DABS which were complete rubbish and didn't work (couldn't write or read). I then bought some PC Line -DVR blanks from PC World which I could write to about 1 in every 4 but could not read the data back in the Pioneer drive, and I now have some Yellow Datawrite dvd-r 4.7gb. I seem to be able to write successfully to these, but so far can only read one of them. When inserted into the drive it thinks about it then says "Please insert a disk into drive G". Any ideas whats going on here. I'm simply trying to back up data at the moment.

[bugster]

Either you are having a great deal of bad luck with your media purchases or your drive is defective. Often poor media would be the 1st choice but in your case it may be the latter. To be sure it is not media, try and find some Ritek G04 disks. The ones you have may even be riteks, use a disc ID utility from the tools section to check. If you still have problems with Riteks. then it is almost certainly a problem with the drive.

[Newbee999]

Many thanks for your advice bugster.

My disks are PRINCO not RITEK but like you say should still work ok. Interestingly the disks I thought didn't work apparently do work if I leave the burnt disk in the drive, then re-boot. But as soon as I remove the disk and try another I get the error again. Sounds like a duff drive to me, unless someone can think of a setting I may have set wrongly somewhere ?