LIGHTNING UK!

It's an option when Windows first starts. Press the F8 key the second windows starts to load and you should get a menu with Safe Mode as an option on it. I wouldn't buy a prebuilt external drive, just a generic 5.25" usb/esata enclosure and then a decent normal sized drive. I'm a more of a desktop (well, full tower!) pc guy myself (although laptops have their place), but it depends on what you want to spend your money on!

I really don't know. It just looks hit and miss because you're overburning discs that simply weren't ever designed for such a thing. Success/failure of a burn should be 100% down to the drive/firmware/media combo being used.

All you can do is go back to whatever discs you used to use or hack around with the firmware for your drive (if that's even possible) and change it so 2x / 4x are supported. I'm afraid there's nothing ImgBurn itself can do about the issue.

I'm glad that seems to have worked because I had no idea what could/would be causing your drive to behave like that

It looks like you ejected the tray that time... how'd you manage that? A paperclip? Try burning in safe mode and see if that works. Otherwise it's 'buy a new drive' time or just forget the whole thing.

http://forum.imgburn.com/index.php?showtopic=8000

Try a different spindle of Verbatims. If they also fail, try cleaning your drive. If discs from both spindles still fail after that, buy a new drive.

Extract the contents of the image somewhere and use Build mode to make a new one.

Post the log rather than a screenshot please.

ok well now I'd remove NTIDrvr, UBHelper and Pfc from the filter drivers list (using the same tool in ImgBurn). After that it's a case of trying the other things I mentioned and posting new logs if you still have problems after you've exhausted all the options. A last resort would be to buy yourself a decent desktop sized drive and put it in an enclosure.

Ok well if the manual says it won't play PAL stuff, that'll be why it doesn't work. You can Google for how to convert PAL to NTSC - it's not something ImgBurn does.

ImgBurn doesn't change your files so this 'serious degradation of quality' you're seeing is a figment of your imagination or caused by external factors. Just MD5 the files on your hdd and compare them to the ones on the disc. You'll see they're identical.

Nope... but I'm not so sure DMA is a big issue under those OS's. Microsoft probably fixed whatever used to cause it to keep dropping back to PIO mode. If you think you have DMA problems, remove the ide/ata/atapi controller entries from within Device Danager and reboot. (as per the post in the FAQ)

Well, a disc that the burner can't read doesn't exactly inspire confidence!

You need to post a log so we can see what you're doing. PowerDVD 11 is better than WinDVD. Arcsoft TotalMedia Theatre is another option.

You just got a bad burn. If all your discs fail around that LBA (1680615), you've probably got a faulty batch. The iHAS drives are perfectly capable of burning 'MKM-003-00 media to their fullest (but not always overburnt!) capacity. See here... http://forum.imgburn.com/index.php?showtopic=18871&view=findpost&p=136024

Sounds like you enabled 'Preserve Full Pathnames'. That option is NOT enabled by default.

MKM-003-00 is the dye used by the Verbatim discs. 4x is the other speed (besides 2.4x) that your drive says it supports on them. If you look in the tools menu in ImgBurn, you'll see an option mentioning the filter drivers. Click it. Click the copy to clipboard button, paste here in the forum.

Install XP SP3. Uninstall ImgBurn (to wipe out all the old settings) and then install the latest version. Try again with the MKM-003-00 at 4x. It's a slim line drive and they're all pretty rubbish. Combine that with the cheapo RITEK-S04-66 dye and you're asking for trouble. As such, I kinda have to ignore your most recent failure. Cleaning the drive with a cleaning disc may also help. Can you post your filter driver list for me too please. The option is in the Tools menu.

Can your player play PAL (rather than the usual NTSC) content?

Try the other supported write speeds - i.e. 2.4x and 4x.

Show me the disc info from such a disc please. Go into read mode and copy + paste all the info on the right.

It looks like it's just too many characters. It works ok in Windows 7 but it truncates what gets filled out in the 'File Name' line to 259 characters. Even then it wouldn't let you click the 'Save' button in the dialog box, it keeps saying the name is invalid. You have to delete characters (making the name shorter) until the entire path can fit in 260 characters.

It just looks like aggressive WOPC type stuff to me. When it's checking the burn quality on-the-fly, the buffer empties.

Assuming that's an exact copy+paste of what ImgBurn read from the tag, I'll put it in one of my files and perform some tests on it. Whatever the issue is, I'll try for a workaround/fix in the next release.