CD-RW doesn't RW

[John]

I have an eMachines 1860 running XP-home. It came with a HL-DT-ST CD-RW
GCE-8320B CD-RW. I added a GoldStar CD-ROM GCD-R542B.
All was fine for over a year; then the machine gave me a blue screen with an
error message (that I couldn't read because it was all broken up with white
stripes) when I tried to use the CD-RW as a destination for NTBACKUP; which
I had down successfully for a year.

Digging around, I found that Windows shows the drive as a CD-RW when no disk
is in it, as a CD-R when a R disk is in it, and as a CD-ROM when a RW disk
is in. It works properly with a R disk in, but of course I can't write my
backups to a R disk (unless someone knows how to do that...) It will not
write to the RW disk, but INCD will format it okay.
Just to clarify; the drive works normally with ROM or R, but regards RW as
being ROM; except when formating with INCD.

Also, and I don't know if this is new or old, on boot up BIOS does not show
my Goldstar drive at all, unless I tell it to find it. Then it finds it
just fine. This doesn't seem to make any difference to operations;
apparently Windows doesn't care what BIOS shows?

So, any idea how to get my CD-RW writing again, or is it just time for a new
drive?
Thanks.

 

[J. Clarke]

I have an eMachines 1860 running XP-home. It came with a HL-DT-ST CD-RW
GCE-8320B CD-RW. I added a GoldStar CD-ROM GCD-R542B.
All was fine for over a year; then the machine gave me a blue screen with
an error message (that I couldn't read because it was all broken up with
white stripes) when I tried to use the CD-RW as a destination for
NTBACKUP; which I had down successfully for a year.

Digging around, I found that Windows shows the drive as a CD-RW when no
disk is in it, as a CD-R when a R disk is in it, and as a CD-ROM when a RW
disk
is in. It works properly with a R disk in, but of course I can't write my
backups to a R disk (unless someone knows how to do that...) It will not
write to the RW disk, but INCD will format it okay.
Just to clarify; the drive works normally with ROM or R, but regards RW as
being ROM; except when formating with INCD.

Also, and I don't know if this is new or old, on boot up BIOS does not
show
my Goldstar drive at all, unless I tell it to find it. Then it finds it
just fine. This doesn't seem to make any difference to operations;
apparently Windows doesn't care what BIOS shows?

So, any idea how to get my CD-RW writing again, or is it just time for a
new drive?

Considering the price of a multimode DVD burner these days, it sounds like
time for a new drive.

 

[Guest]

You may want to consider using http://www.firestreamer.com/fsdvd/ that
allows NTBACKUP to write directly to DVD. You'll avoid a lot of
hassles.

Cheers