How do you recover a Rewritable disk gone bad....

[Hoagie_one]

I was burning a DVD+RW disk today and the burner skipped or something and the disk never finished the burn, the machine crashed. I restarted it. I just need to reformat teh DVD+RW disk but every time i put the disk in, XP's stupid autoplay tries to read it and my drive and the disk do the eternal dance of death, never fully reading the disk, but trying, never leaving the disk alone so I can reformat it. It spins, then stops, then spins then stops and never gets past it.

Any ideas on how to do this. Oh, and the only way to disable autoplay in XP home is through a registry edit, which im trying to avoid, and may not solve my problem.

IDEAS?

[JimJohnD]

I can only think of three things to try...

1. Try formatting it in a machine with the 'Auto-Insert Notification' turned off on the DVD drive.

2. I have heard that if you expose the 'write' side of the disk to direct sunlight for a few hours it will be 'erased'. Check on it every 15 min. or so, the disc should not get too hot or it will warp. If it gets warm just remove it from the light to cool and resume. Seems like alot of work for just a DVD RW

3. Toss the disc and use another one, they're not that expensive.

Hope this helps, maybe someone else will have some ideas.

[lordsmurf]

Leaving a disc in sunlight will more likely ruin it even worse than it is already.

[overloaded_ide]

I think you can stop the auto run by holding down the shift or Ctrl key when you put in the disk. I always forget what key, I seldom do it.

It seems RW disks are a Pain in DVD, I liked them in CDs though. I have a hard time erasing/formating them too. Even when written correctly and they work. I got cheapo's so it could be my disks but I see other with the same problem!

Keep trying, took me 3 trys on one disk and it finally was balnk and usable again! Course a $1.25, it wasn't really worth the trouble I had with it! I was just determend I was gonna WIN.

[Hoagie_one]

It just irritates me as I like to use RW's as a test disk so i dont go make a ton of coasters. I was hoping that there was some utility that could save my butt.