I have found the CD burning feature of Vista to be procedurally bound. It
works better on my systems if you approach it in one or two very specific
ways, step-wise, even though the user interface lets you get at it from many
directions. I have arrived at an uneasy truce with it, and it is working for
me now. All I can suggest is that you try performing a burn by following the
procedure to see if it will work on your system.
1. Open Explorer, and select the folders files you want to burn in the
right-hand pane.
2. Click on the Burn button in Explorer's toolbar.
3. A dialog will pop up asking you to place a writable disc in the drive,
and the drive should open. Put an EMPTY disc in the drive.
4. The disc formatting dialog will pop up asking you to name the disc (A
date-based name will already have been supplied, if you want to accept that.)
and to choose the type of burn. I strongly urge you to choose "Mastered".
Just plan your burns so that you just burn once to the disc -- if that is
possible.
5. The "calculating time" progress bar dialog will pop up to amuse you with
its wildly ludicrous (at least on some systems) estimation of how many eons
will be required for the burn session. (We make bets on the time span in the
lab. I saw one estimate at 84 days plus. Cute, eh?)
6. Vista will now try to trick you by throwing up a balloon message from the
system tray. Do NOT click on it. No matter how many times it pops up. (If
you're burning a few gigs to a writeable DVD the balloon may well pop up 9 or
10 times.) As I said, do NOT click on the balloon. When the system is
actually ready to burn, it will open a new explorer instance showing the root
directory of the target drive populated with the shortcutted symbols for the
folders / files you are burning. If you click on the balloon before this time
you will get an Explorer window showing PART of the file population you chose
to burn. Only place to go from there, in my experience, is to cancel and
start over.
7. Now that you have the Explorer window showing the root of the target
drive just click the Burn button in that new Explorer window.
8. You'll get another dialog with a burn speed dropdown selector. (I've
never bothered to change the speed.) Make sure you UNcheck the "close this
dialog" box if you want to burn the same file/folder population to more than
one disc. If you leave the box checked you won't get the choice.
9. If all goes well, the system will go through the burn, and the disc will
be ejected. If the disc is not ejected automatically (And this DOES happen,
even though you've set the global system default to close the disc and eject
it.) then you won't be getting that disc out without at least a log off /
logon cycle, if not a reboot.
10. Check the danged disc to be sure the files really were burned to it. If
it didn't eject automatically you'll want to use a folder/file comparison
utility to be sure alll of the files were closed and are actually useable
backups.
It is possible, also, to adapt this procedure for RW type discs, but it
isn't for the faint of heart.
I posted a slightly different procedure elsewhere in these newsgroups which
was about as successful as this one. This one has the advantage of a few more
tries under the belt and works routinely on four widely different Vista
machines in our lab. I haven't actually seen a drive fail to eject a disc
when this protocol was followed, but such a failure was reported by one of my
loopier colleagues. (We think he had just had too much Kool-Aid yesterday.)