I bought a new BusLink drive yesterday, a Ricoh 5125. I've encountered several problems with the software, but the most recent problem I've encountered seems pretty strange to me.

I wanted to see if my old Sony DVD player would be able to read these DVD+R discs, so I attempted to burn a 90 minute video to a DVD-RW. I used the neoDVD 3.0 standard software that came with the drive. Everything worked fine, and the disc played in my computer, but would not play in my old Sony. No real surprise there.

So since my player couldn't see the DVD+RW disc, I decided to try a DVD+R disc instead. I again used neoDVD, selected the same exact files, performed the same exact procedure, but put a DVD+R disc in the burner instead.

NeoDVD went through exactly the same process as before, eventually burning to the new disc. Like before, when it finished it reported that the disc had been created successfully.

But when I examined the disc, I could see that it had only recorded a tiny bit of data to it. I tried the resulting DVD in my Sony player and got no response from it. I put it in the DVD drive in my laptop, and the entire system hung. I put it back into the system that created it, and it never even saw a disc in the drive. In short, a coaster.

So why would a procedure that worked perfectly on a DVD+RW fail completely on a DVD+R? And why would it report complete success?

Is this likely a hardware problem or a software problem?

Incidentally, this is the third DVD+R that I've attempted to burn - the other two were plain DVD-ROM data discs. Of those first two, only one was successful. The other failed in a manner quite similar to this failure - Nero reported complete success, but the disc had no data on it.