Right, I have an NEC 2500A DVD writer drive in my PC and have had it for years - never given me any grief, works fine I burn CD-R's, CD-RW's and DVD-R's (as in "dash" not "plus)

Untill today that is.....

Boss at work has bought a DVD recorder and said tome yesterday that the discs she bought come up as "unsupported" when she sicks em in and won't play. So she brought a couple in for me today, and the idea was I would burn a film onto one of em and just format the other - so she could see if the film one is watchable and the formatted one will let her record on em. They are Verbatim DVD+RW discs.

So I stuck in the one she had opened, and Nero had no problem writing a 3.5gb film to it, but there were two stange things. 1) Before starting the burn process, it said it was going to format the disc. It did this, then burned. 2) The option to leave the disc unfinalised was grey'd out, meaning you can't add to it later.... This shows up as total size of disc is 3.5gb with no free space (it's a 4.7gb disc)

Right, never mind I thought, bunged it in the DVD player and it's fine, no probs...

So I stuck the second disc into the PC and nothing happened. It wouldn't show up as inserted in MY COMPUTER, and it wouldn't let me eject the disc!!!! I ended up having to reboot and only THEN it let me eject.

So I tried again. It let me burn to it with Nero, and erase it again (for some reason erase only took 17secs lol) but it shows up in MY COMPUTER as a CD-R disc, not a DVR+RW (for reference, the DVD+RW I burned a film to works fine in the PC, but shows up as "DVD-R" instead of DVD+RW

Anyway, it won't let me write pics or MP3's to the DVD+RW using the normal Windows write mode, only with Nero...

Anyone know why?

 

Also won't let me erase the DVD+RW from using Windows, only with Nero....

I'm thinking that DVD+RW is shit lol......

 

 

If you want to burn a disc, and add to it later, you need to burn it as a multi session disc

And the 2nd disc is probably fucked m8, or the basic shoddy windows xp cd writing software doesn't support it. Either way, stick with Nero.

 

I know you have to burn as multisession, but it had that box greyed out and wouldn't let me select it Both discs were initally recognised as "CD-R" not DVD+RW, untill I burned a film to the first disc using NERO. Now that disc is recognised as a "DVD-R" and not a +RW, and the other disc is recognised only as a CD-R but windows won't write to it.... Must admit tho, I have not bothered to try and write to it with Nero...

Think I'll try DVD-RW next, as I have had no probs with -R's, so maybe -RW's are the ones for me.....