BE-RE disc becomes unuseable and Imgburn crashes Windows Explorer

[peterm6389]

I have a Verbatim BD-RE DL disc which I have used numerous times successfully with Imgburn.  The latest burn, however has produced a disc which plays fine in my Blu-Ray player but which is unuseable in the PC.  If I load it in the drive then sometimes Imgburn hangs trying to read the media, other times it successfully gets the media information but when I try to burn a new ISO file it gives the message "Terminating auto insert thread", waits a while and after some minutes Windows Explorer crashes and Imgburn tells me the drive was disconnected.  The same thing happens if I try to format the disc.  Does anyone have ideas what's going on?

 

Thanks.

[dbminter]

First thing I would try to do is power off the PC/burner if it's external if you haven't done that already.  It's surprising sometimes how a simple power cycle can fix random errors that happen with optical drives in Windows.  Power cycling also cycles Windows which sometimes needs a restart, too, to fix some issues.

[peterm6389]

The burner is internal and I've powered off and rebooted several times, to no effect.  I even tried restoring an older Acronis backup to see if some recent file corruption had occurred but this also made no difference.

[dbminter]

Well, it's always possible your system image imaged the problem that was created.  Unless you have an image made like when you first got the system and tried testing with it, the only thing I can suggest is if you have another BD-RE DL you haven't tried using yet.  See if that does any good.  I'd be worried about the drive being the problem at that point.  You could also try formatting the BD-RE DL as a Windows giant floppy and try writing files to it in Windows Explorer.  See where that gets you.

[peterm6389]

The image was made 6 months ago and I've made several successful burns on the same disk then since then, so I don't think I restored the problem.

[dbminter]

Then, you can pretty much isolate the problem to hardware.  If your image was made 6 months ago, and the burns had worked since then, then if you restored to this image and the problem is still there, it showed up after you had successful burns.  Since a working image produces the same error, you know it's not a configuration or Windows error, unless somehow some BIOS settings got changed.  Therefore, you can pretty much pin the problem to either the drive or something inside the computer.

 

 

How old is this drive?  I'd be more likely to just trying to replace the drive and see if that helps.