Expert: Roy Bonner - 10/28/2006

Question
Good day,

My dvd drive Matshita sw 9584d will not burn. From my JVC digital video camera via firewire video capture and play back on pc are fine.

WMM and Nero occasionally burn and fill the disk but there appears to be nothing on it.

On other occasions I am asked to insert a disk when a disk is already in drive.  The light stops flashing and there is no disk activity.

Sometimes Wmm and Nero go through the motions of burning but nothing on disk, empty, there being no light or activity.

WMM recognises the drive as audio cd on a regular basis

I have tried several brands of disk, from expensive to cheap DVD-R and RW.

The drive will play dvd's

My OS is xp pro sp2
pc is HP compaq 80 gb hdd 512 mb ram  Pentium 4 CPU 2.84 ghz. All drives set to DMA

The drive is relatively new.

Any advice greatly appreciated.

Many thanks for your time.  

Answer
Hi Roy,
Apart from the fact that the drive reads DVDs OK, I would have suspected a problem with the drive, even if it is quite new. The other possibility, which I would have rated at only about 30%, is a software malfunction in the Operating System. However, you say you are recording Raw video datavia firewire from a camcorder. It would be interesting to know just how much free drive space you had left when you were trying to burn the dvds. When I started doing that, I found my 200Gb hard drive was totally inadequate and fitted another 300Gb drive just for video, lack of drive space could have much to do with your problem, as could lack of RAM, I have 1024Mb, and it really isn't enough, I'm thinking of going up to 3072Mb.

Regards

Roy