My drive will play CD,s and Dvd,s but will not recognize a blank Cd or Dvd so I can Burn them.I have tried many different makes of discs and none work. Originally it did work OK until I had computer crash a couple of years ago.I have upgraded BIOS and Drivers to no avail. When checking on the manager it tells me there is no problems with it. Any help will be appreciated.

Hi bigee,

I'll start with the dumb question first. Is the drive compatible to burn CD/DVDs on it? For instance does it say CD-RW or DVD RW or something to that affect on the front of the drive. What kind of software are you attempting to use to burn discs? Have you tried connecting a different IDE (ribbon) cable to it? Let me know!

Thanks,
Farva

Also I looked on Dells website and there is a whole slew of drivers for the CD/DVD drive for that machine. You may want to try downloading different one's and see if you get any sort of different results

here's where you can find the drivers:

http://support.dell.com/support/downloads/driverslist.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=gen&os=WW1&osl=en&catid=&impid=&SystemID=PLX_GX620

Yep the drive is compatible as I have burned cd,s and dvd,s previously I am using windows media player11 ( it worked before) I changed the ribbon cable and it made no difference, As I said I can play DVD,S AND CD,S but it won't pick up a blank disc. It will also play pictures that I burned on a cd from power point viewer. I am wondering if it is a hardware problem and not a software hicup.

You might be right with the faulty hardware. Hey dvd/cd burners are cheap these days. You can even get portable USB ones now! I would at least attempt to use something other then windows media player (it is kind of a POS) here are a couple of links for great free burning software

http://www.imgburn.com/ - very configurable. More recommended for advanced users
http://www.burnaware.com/burnaware_free.html - very popular!

If neither of those detect a blank disc, then I'm going with hardware issue as well. Good luck!

Hi Farva I down loaded burnaway free and it works like a charm , burns cd, dvds with no problem . Thanks for your help and the info you gave me Eric.

Awesome! I like Microsoft, but sometimes they just make crappy stuff. For instance Windows media player... lol, anyway glad you got that worked out!

bigee just fyi to me your issue sounds like it came from multiple programs with the capability of burning causing a issue. In the future if you have that sort of issue uninstall all programs with burning features(windows media player, as well as any other) then reinstall your burning programs.