Nero/DVD Burner Acting Bizarre

[Cman429]

I have a Philips 200 series DVD-RW burner on an XP computer.

I bought a giant spindle of liquidvideo dvd+r's.

I've been happily burning these without fail for 4 months now.

Today, I went to burn one using the latest Nero and got an 'unspecified target error."

Fine. So I tried another disk, this time it never got started. It just says 0% for like 5 minutes and then I get a "FAILED" message.

So, I thought my DVD burner was toast. I tried to burn a cd. No problems. I tried to burn a DVD+RW. It also worked.

Although it worked VERY SLOWLY (a disk that would take me 25 minutes before took me an hour this time).

So I tried the DVD+r's again. Again, it says "Burning"---it whirs around for a bit staying at 0% and then FAILED.

I don't really want to reformat my hardddrive if I don't have to. Does anybody have a clue what's going on? (And as I said, I doubt its the media because I've successfully burned about 20 disks already).

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[thecoalman]

Recent SP2 update? If this suddenly started after installing the SP2 update well.... If that's the case try reinstalling Nero and any updates they have. Might want to check with the DVD burner manufacturer to make sure you have the latest firmware.

[Cman429]

Thanks for such a quick reply.

To answer you, I haven't updated anything. Maybe if this is some sort of automatic update that could be the problem but it was nothing I did (purposely, if this is a virus or something then mea culpa).

I'll look into the firmware but it just seems strange to me that it'll burn RW's and CD's but not DVD+R's. I'd think if there was a driver problem it wouldn't work at all.

And this is why I'm so confused.

[pchan]

Hi Cman429,
I think your DVD is burner may not be compatible with the media. My Benq burner is very picky with -R media.

[thecoalman]

If you have windows autoupdating your computer you probably downloaded it. To see go contol panel>system> under the general tab/sytem it will tell you what service pack you have installed. It's not a virus or anyhting but a update for XP from Microsoft.

Don't know if that's the problem it's just a suggestion.

[proxyx99]

Good idea would be to try a different burning program to eliminate Nero as a culprit. Try Nero support site for their interpretation of this error message. Failing DVD writer may still write perfect CDR (just like mine before it died) so this is not a good indicator.
If the burner works OK with another DVD writing program (DVD authoring app or similar) look into Nero. Another possibility is a laser pickup failure of your writer... you alredy know what that means...

[Cman429]

Okay, I did as suggested and tried another burner beside nero (Free2Burn or something like that).

It did the same thing. It said burning, whirred to life, the red light (indicating burn) never came on, it whirred for 5 minutes then errored.

The error message this time indicated something about a connection error.

I checked the DMA/POI thing and its all set to UltraDMA so that's not the issue.

I reinstalled Nero and my first burn sorta worked. It started up, started burning (REALLY SLOW again), took up ALL my CPU usage, then at about 30% it errored and died.

I'm really aggravated here. I'll give this another day and then I'm reformatting my harddrive. If that doesn't solve the problem, I'll be quite unhappy.

[proxyx99]

It's always a good idea to write the error msg down (no more "something like that...").
To the point. That is what I thought. It's not likely that it's software. Check your hardware connections (replug) or move it to a different cable/bus position temporarily.
The fact that it takes 5 min. to spit the msg out tells me that it's your DVD drive that is faulty (or its connection). Get ready for a new one if connections are OK. The last (likely) possibility is the ATAPI/IDE driver fault. Check MS KB for troubleshooting. You may reinstall XP on top of the existing one to repair it.