@gwhatnow yeah Braynes has a point. If you are backing up a dvd, you have to have at least 5GB of free, preferably continuous harddrive space to burn the entire image on the HDD before burning to a disc. But if you are just backing up data already on your hdd, then you should be OK. You will be better off defragging your hdd often and, since you are going through the usb and/or firewire ports with burst rates of ~12mb(check that in nero cd-dvd-speed or with Kprobe>info>drive, scroll down to bottom), you should halt other activity(including as many background programs as possible) during a burn and plugging your notebook into the wall vs. off the battery would help. Expect a top speed of only 8x with a burn time around 9-10 minutes. I also burn with an external usb, and I am careful to create an ideal as possible burning environment or else I get what you got. Have you used Kprobe 2.4.2 @4x speed to scan your discs? Save the scan as a .png file by the diskette icon in the upper right corner and attach to a post with the 'manage attachments' button in the 'go advanced' reply window. So before you run out and spend $, try these suggestions and let us know how it went.