I recently purchased a Sony Vaio PCV-RS410 for my wife's small business. It is running Windows XP home edition and contains a Sony DVD RW DW-U12A drive. I have been a Roxio Easy CD Creator user for a few years now. I installed and tried my copy v.5.1 Platinum with the computer and could not get a CD-RW to format. It would start and run for a few seconds and then Roxio would complain that the disc could not be formatted. I could not write files to CD-RWs formatted on other machines either although I could read them. I updated my software to 5.3.5 along with the drive updates. Still not working. Then, I noticed on the Roxio website that the drive is supported by Platinum v.6. So, I purchased Easy CD & DVD creator 6. I uinstalled the old stuff and installed the new version. Still, I am having similar problems.

I tried to use Drag-to-Disc to format a CD-RW, but I had very similar (non) results. I tried to merely copy some files to a blank CD-R using Creator Classic. That did not work either, but I did get more descriptive error messages. I updated the drives firmware to 2.0e via Sony's website. I checked for updates here. Still, I have not been able to write to the drive (CD-R or CD-RW). I have not been able to format any CD-RWs. I forget the last error message I received from Creator Classic, but it said someting to the effect that I certain area on the disc could not be read. These are brand new discs and some made by different vendors.

I posted a similar message in the Roxio discussion groups. One other person who did the same thing on a similar machine said that Sony advised them to perform a full system recovery and then install v.6 of the Roxio software. I'll probably try this anyway. I'll contact Sony if that does not work.

I just want to be able to use the drive for backups.

Any other ideas? Anything that I am missing?

Thanks,
Joseph