dbminter

Unfortunately, CMC seemed to buy the Taiyo Yuden good brand name and proceeded to slap their crap media with its good name to trick people. Now, I've not seen any discs since TY closed up shop and CMC bought their name, so, maybe, though I doubt it, CMC is shipping decent quality media. Most likely, it's the same old CMC crap with a good name slapped on it. Check in ImgBurn for the Disc/Manufacturer ID. In Write mode, look for a DID/MID field in the right hand side pane of ImgBurn and copy and paste it. If it says CMC, it's probably typical CMC However, DID's can be faked with anything the manufacturer wants to put in there. I wouldn't put it past CMC to slap a Taiyo Yuden DID on their cheap crap CMC media. There's an old Spanish saying: "The cheap comes out expensive." Verbatim DataLife Plus costs more but it's worth it. Plus, it's only just a little over 50 cents a blank! I can remember paying $14 a blank 16 years ago for quality Panasonic DVD-R. It's up to you whether you want to use cheap media. But, cheap media tends to be unreadable, sometimes even after less than a year, after it burns. Plus, a successful burn is no guarantee a CMC disc will be readable by a particular brand of player. I had some CMC's to use as temporaries for someone to view, being only a $10 stack of 10 DVD+R. The person I made these home movies for couldn't get them to play in their DVD player because they were CMC crap. Actually, you shouldn't need the silver shiny media if you're never going to write a label on to them. The branded media will do and it's probably cheaper.

Memorex farmed out their BD-R and BD-RE to Ritek. Caused all kinds of playback problems on the Playstation 3. Verbatim BD-R and BD-RE don't.

It's unusual to find Ritek in Verbatim media. Still, it's better quality than CMC. CMC is bottom of the barrel. I've found Ritek to generally be a decent 2nd tier product. However, some people, particularly in Europe, don't get good quality Ritek. Sony farms out their DVD-R to Ritek now, that much I do know.

Well, if you bought Verbatim at a Best Buy, they will, most likely, be the cheap crap CMC media from Life Series. If you're going to get Verbatim, only get the DataLife Plus series which you'll only find online.

Wait a minute. Didn't I already reply to this a few times somewhere else?

Oh, and you wouldn't most likely have a bad download copy of ImgBurn. If it was corrupt, it wouldn't run and install. It would be highly unlikely that it downloads just enough to execute, install ImgBurn just enough so that it works, but not work right. With something like this, it's an all or nothing situation.

ImgBurn keeps logs. In ImgBurn, open Help, and select ImgBurn logs. It will open the folder containing your log file. The log file is one master log that contains all the logs. So, you'll have to look through it to find a specific operation.

The whole RW thing was an attempt to make money. The DVD-R people were making all the money off of recordable DVD so a group of other companies started DVD+RW and a new format war so they could cash in. The RW logo just means the DVD+RW consortium. They force the use of the logo because it costs manufacturers to put the logo on the media to "certify" it. It's just a cheap, money making ploy. While +R/RW media has its advantages, it just started more headaches with a new format war until Sony created the first dual format DVD burners. Then, it didn't matter what your personal preference. It only mattered, back then, that DVD-R was more compatible with older players. Now, it doesn't matter anymore. In order to be rewritable, it must say DVD+RW on it. Not just the RW logo. As your photos show, it has the RW logo on it, but it says DVD+R DL. DVD+R and DVD+R DL are write once media. Why your Windows out trying to format something it couldn't is beyond me. But, if you put that disc in ImgBurn, it will tell you if it can be written to or not. It may not be salvageable because Windows tried to format it as a giant floppy and failed. That would be what Windows would try to do if you selected Format on a DVD+R DL, I would guess. If it failed then the disc is useless, which may be why Windows now says it cannot write to that disc. ImgBurn would also tell you if that disc can be written to or not anymore.

DVD+R DL is WORM (Write Once, Read Many). Meaning, it can't be erased. It can be written to once and exactly once. The RW logo is just the logo for the DVD+RW standard/forum. There are no rewritable DL media for DVD. There were supposed to be some released years ago, but that never got to actual production stage.

I don't remember the Master/Slave settings. It's been too long since I last had to deal with them. You'll want either the LG WH NS60 (NOT the NS40!) or Pioneer's 2209/whatever the Ultra HD BD model is now. Those are the only 2 suggestions I would recommend. I'd normally used to always say the Pioneer, but they keep screwing around with the firmware making it not properly write Ritek 8x DVD+RW. They'd get it right, bork it in a new firmware, I'd tell them the problem, they'd fix it, then add a new bork in a later firmware. Endless whack-a-mole. Once I discovered the LG NS60 fixed the issues of the NS40, I've used that drive exclusively over my Pioneer 2209.

It's probably down to the age of the drive. The whole Master/Slave thing I don't think is even addressed in BIOS anymore because there are no more jumpers on drives for them. SATA seemed to do away with the need for Master/Slave settings of drives. Of course, back in the days of PATA, I set everything to Master whenever possible just to avoid headaches. I only use BD burners now, so I don't have any DVD burner recommendations. However, I'd avoid all 3 of those options. I don't think Optiarc is even made anymore. LiteOn's add random pauses into DVD DL VIDEO_TS video that aren't layer breaks. ASUS is 50/50 with me. My first BD burner with them was absolutely fantastic. The 2nd was It destroyed rewritable DVD+RW and BD-RE DL.

I've never heard of a physical RAM drive. All RAM drives I'm aware of take physical memory allocation in RAM and turn it into a virtual drive that runs much faster than your hard disk. Do you mean the drive was a DVD-R/RAM drive, like my first DVD burner was? A Panasonic DVD-R that only wrote to CD-R, DVD-R, and DVD-RAM.

It's most likely not the drive that's died. You say it works for 2/3 of your attempts, but not on 1/3. In a case like that, that most likely means that for whatever reason, the drive doesn't like those discs and won't read them. Your best bet is to try another drive by another manufacturer. You wouldn't be able to tell it's a Windows configuration issue until you knew what the problem was. Therefore, you'd know it's a Windows configuration issue. Without a specific error message, and given it works on 2/3 of the discs you've tried, it's probably not that.

Does anything show up in ImgBurn with this Samsung drive? Any CD's, audio or otherwise? Does it recognize blank discs of anything besides DVD+R like CD-R for burning when inserted? If you're dealing with Master and Slave setups, you must have a fairly old model as I don't think they even have jumpers anymore for those settings. It may just be this drive is too old.

I'm curious as to why you rolled back the firmware of the LG drive to 1.02 over 1.03. I didn't find anything wrong with 1.03, since all 1.03 did was introduce anti-copying measures for 4K video. It did nothing to fix the many fatal flaws in that drive, of which there are, well, many. I like the NS60 model. I use it now over my Pioneer 2209 in the OWC enclosure versus the Vantec which is giving me many problems on my 2209. The NS40 has fatal flaws writing to BD-R/RE DL media.

I'm somewhat of a programmer, too; I majored in computer science. Of course, all we're doing is speculating until LUK chimes in with how, exactly, he approached the code. I've tended to notice things I've posted as issues/bugs with file navigation, access, etc. are generally unresolvable because they're down to how Microsoft implements them in Visual C++. Of course, I got my degree in 1996, so things have changed considerably in that time. You see, back in my day, we used to have these things called floppy disks...

I would say ImgBurn can't nothing do anything about the performance of how it handles files. That the slow access of smaller files is down to the file system on the source/target partition.

I wouldn't be surprised if it's the chipset or bridge in the enclosure. I've been having my own issues with Vantec enclosures on my Pioneer BD-209M. I keep getting failed BD-R burns and dropping communication with the device. But, my Other World Computing enclosure doesn't have these issues. Just its own.

Well, if you get errors on one drive with a CD-RW that you don't get with the same CD-RW in another drive, the problem is the drive. Could be something as simple as that drive doesn't like that particular manufacturer of disc. Or something more complicated and more difficult to troubleshoot. Of those media in that last post, the only one I recognize at all is the Mitsubishi one, which is the best CD-R out there. They make Verbatim's quality DataLife Plus/AZO CD-R and not the cheap CMC from Verbatim's Life Series. Since I don't recognize any of the other media manufacturers, I would be wary to call them quality.

Just best to wait for the disk thrashing to stop. In fact, burning will stop until the hard drive activity reaches a certain level. So, if you cancel burning, you will have a disc that is relatively useless. Unfortunately, all kinds of things could be causing access to the hard disk. Antivirus software is a good candidate. You can try putting the image you want to burn on a different partition than the one with Windows on it, which is what I do. Yah! 6,000th post!

BTW, using ImgBurn in conjunction with AnyDVD to rip DVD's has one fatal flaw. It's fine as long as the DVD isn't protected with structural copy protection. AnyDVD will tell you if they are such protected. If they are so protected, you should use AnyDVD's Rip to hard disk function for those kinds of DVD's. Ripping to ISO with ImgBurn may appear to work in that you'll get an image file, but the resulting image file may not actually be a playable DVD. That's why I always recommend using the Rip to hard disk function. If you make it a habit to do that, you will cover all your bases, including structurally protected DVD's. You'll just have to remember to copy any contents besides VIDEO_TS from the DVD's root directory over.

It's probably the fault of the slim model drive in the laptop. Slim models are absolute junk. You're using the high quality Verbatim discs, so that's not the issue. Unfortunately, the sad fact of the matter is slim model burners really are junk. But, that's all you can get in a laptop. Well, all you can get in ANYTHING now since they took half height bays out of a lot of modern cases now. Short of buying a half height burner and an enclosure for it to connect to the laptop via USB, you're probably pretty much screwed.

Sounds like your drive probably gave up the ghost. If you were successfully getting reads fine before and it suddenly starts up on every other disc, it's most likely the drive being the problem. You won't know for sure without replacing it. If you replace it and still get problems, then there's some kind of Windows configuration problem somewhere most likely.

About all you can do with a flash drive is create an ISO in Build mode of the contents. However, this won't be of too much use unless you want to install Windows from within Windows. There is a Guide somewhere, I think, that tell you how to create a bootable ISO from Windows install CD, but I don't know how that will translate to a flash drive, where you'd still need to extract the boot sector. If you're not concerned about booting the ISO you can, as I said, just use Build mode to copy over the flash drive contents to an ISO. However, you cannot copy this ISO to another flash drive. It will only copy to an optical disc like DVD. ImgBurn doesn't clone flash drives nor will it write to them.

OpenCandy is not a virus. AV software would flag it as a PUP, Potentially Unwanted Program. While it is an unwanted program, it's not a virus.