LIGHTNING UK!

Try and find a firmware update for your drive?

I'm not sure I like the idea of using a disc that the burner itself cannot read, but maybe that's something they'll fix in the next firmware release - if one ever comes out. You should really avoid using LTH discs if possible. They aren't as good / reliable as the HTL ones.

Before panicking, you should probably go and read the OpenCandy website. http://www.opencandy.com/ Yes, the ImgBurn installer uses the OpenCandy plug-in to display 3rd party product offerings as part of the installation process. There are loads of bits of software in the OpenCandy database so you could be offered different things each time you run the installer. If you don't want what it's offering, just opt-out of (or don't opt-in to, as the case may be) installing them.

Buy some decent discs - verbatim / Taiyo Yuden.

Try the other supported write speeds and try some decent discs - verbatim / Taiyo Yuden.

No, that's just how the drive is designed to work I guess. A future firmware update may change that.

You wouldn't use it for that. Just copy your ISO files to the portable hdd using drag and drop in Explorer.

Which part is confusing you? How many choices do you have in the lLB selection window? Post a screenshot of it if possible please.

If you aren't going the 'slim' route, get an enclosure and put your own choice of BD drive in it. I'd go for a Pioneer.

I have no experience of those, just the two I mentioned in my post.

No idea, sorry.

Post the family tree info for that drive please. Right click the drive selection box when you're in Read mode and pick 'family tree'. Close the box that comes up and then copy + paste everything from the log box.

That's good. Now you're running it in the correct/current user context, drag and drop will work properly between Explorer and the app too (Windows would have been blocking it)

Going back to your initial question, I don't see why that would be the case. I know double discs are meant to be more 'readable' when both layers contain the same amount of data, but obviously that doesn't apply to single layer media. I'm no expert on the technical / scientific properties of media though, so if someone who has that level of knowledge tells you otherwise, take their word for it!

If you have the performance issue when SPTD is installed and running, yes, you need to disable/uninstall it to fix that problem. 'Elaborate Bytes / Slysoft Virtual CloneDrive' and 'DVDFab Virtual Drive' virtual drives both show us as 'SCSI' devices on my machine so perhaps they'd work if the DAEMON Tools non-SPTD one doesn't (that shows up as 'Virtual' on my machine).

A reinstall of ImgBurn or of your entire OS? Are they mapped to another PC or is it a NAS drive etc? If a PC, which OS is it running? You aren't forcing it to run as admin (elevated) or anything are you?

Use a 'write once' disc. Your drive appears to have a problem with erasing that rewritable one.

I hadn't but I have now. I mapped a couple of drives from a Win 8.1 VMware virtual machine back to shares on the actual host computer and they showed up just fine in the DLE window - both when using the computer name and an IP address for the drive mappings.

Go into write mode and copy + paste everything from the box on the right please. Make sure you have a blank double layer disc in the drive at the time!

Yes and no! It always finalises the discs it burns. There's no option to leave them open so you can come back at a later time and add more data. You can burn multiple images as different sessions via the 'create cue' tool but it'll burn them all in one go and then finalise the disc once it's done.

The Queue is for burning multiple images to multiple discs. i.e. Image 1 in the queue to disc 1. Image 2 in the queue to disc 2 etc. If you were to create the disc you're talking about (using the 'Create CUE' tool), you'd end up with multiple sessions (an ISO used as the data for each I assume) and the last one (which is what a computer would read) would just be full of audio tracks... so it would see it as an Audio CD. Is that what you want to happen?

That looks like an old game CD protected by SafeDisc or SecuROM anti-copy protection. ImgBurn cannot copy such discs.

The download hasn't changed from the day of release. Opencandy can and do change their offer pages all the time ( dynamically). There should never be a version that has no method of opting out though... even if it isn't immediately obvious. Oh and OpenCandy runs within the context of the installation program. It isn't something that gets 'installed'.

'Write image file to disc' There's a guide for it in the 'guides' section too.

In 'read' mode, in the 'source' box on the left. It's labelled as 'file sys' or something.