Hi all I just wanted to post this to all that have been having problems with Sony DRU500. When I first bought the drive I was having lots and lots of problems burning DVD-R's but DVD+R's were ok. I called Sony and all this time I was thinking it might be a media problem. I think I bought every type of DVD-R Media out there with no luck. This is what I was running in my computer at the time.

AMD 1900+ Windows XP without the SP1
DVD-ROM, Two CDR burners, 512 DDR Ram 2100,
5 internal and 1 External Hards Drive totaling 740 Gigs
yes I know its alot. ATI AIW 7500 Video Card and
5.1 SoundBlaster Soundcard.

Anyway I had a bad crash on my Operating System Hard Drive which I had to reformat and reinstall XP. Well at that time I had the XP with the SP1 already in the install disk so I use that one instead of the reg XP w/o SP1. Well after all was install low and behold my DVD burner was now burning DVD-R even ones that were not suppose to work with Sony were working. And at 2x all of them. At the time I had Firmware 1.0d so I wanted to test one of the older firmware and see what happen so I went back to 1.0a and still it was working with every DVD-R I throw at it. Now I'm at 1.0G so if you guys with this problem this might work for u too. Good Luck All. Hope I help