Windows XP Does Not Recognize a DVD-RW Disc

[David Bradbury]

When I insert a DVD-RW disc into the DVD writable drive of
my computer, it is shown as a CD (non-recordable). DVDs
play fine when I insert them. When I have no disk in the
DVD drive it is shown in My Computer as a DVD-R rather
than a DVD-RW.
Any ideas?

 

[André Cruz]

Hello,

Did you try inside your DVD Burner software to see how the software
identifies the disk ? Normally windows can wrong identify disks or even not
identify them at all because windows as no recording capabilities using DVD,
windows only supports writing to cd-roms...

 

[Nathan McNulty]

Actually, it isn't Windows that wrongly identifies the disk, it would be
the firmware for the drive providing the wrong information to Windows.
I would try this:

Open Device Manager (Start-Run-devmgmt.msc) and remove the drive from
under DVD\CD Drives. Reboot and see if it works differently. If not,
try this article:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=316529

You are going to set it to 2 even though it only says CDRW, 2 will give
you the DVDRW