XP Home, Artec RW-481248. Writing Gone to Pot

[vole]

Hi Guys, Hoping someone here will recognise these symptoms and can put me on the right track.

My machine has been working fine from new, including burning CDs (mostly data). Then (3 weeks after the 12 month warranty ran out...) CD writing started failing.

I'm having trouble even working out if this is s/w or a h/w failure.

Symptoms-

1) With a CDR the Win XP CD Writer wizard fails part way through a disk with
"an error in the writing process".

2) Nero (5.5.8.4 bundled) sometimes gets to the end of a write if I crank
the speed right down to about 8x with 48x media. If I write at a higher
speed I get an "invalid write state" failure part way through the write
(log attached).

3) If a failed disk is later reloaded, both the CDRW and my DVD drive says
they are blank discs.

4) Writing to a CDRW from Nero still works perfectly...

I have tried the following-

* Deleted and reinstalled the CD Writer device in Win XP.

* Removed and reinstalled Nero (this fixed a problem with the XP wizard that
said the drive was empty ~50% of the time a blank CDR was loaded.

* Removed/reseated the IDE and power connectors to the drive.

I'm using generic 48x media, but it's the same stuff that's been working fine for a year.

I'm thinking that if I had a hardware (laser) failure, writing to CDRWs wouldn't work, so it has to be s/w. Is this correct?

Any pointers gratefully received. I don't want to buy a new CDRW drive just to find out it's a s/w problem...

Regards: Vol

 

[woody]

Here is a good place to start.Definitely disable native XP burning engine in Xp(see tutorial).If you upgrade to Windows Media player 9,it installs native burning again.

 

[Duracell]

I'm thinking that if I had a hardware (laser) failure, writing to CDRWs wouldn't work, so it has to be s/w. Is this correct?

RW media are burned with much lesser laser power, so it might be possible that RW burning still work, but the laser diode can not afford the power for a high speed CD-R burn;

anyway some simple things should be mentioned:
1. defragment your HDD;
2. go sure DMA is enabled for HDD and CDRW drive;
3. disable your Antivirus for testing purposes;


Greetings from
Duracell