Hi guys, i hope you can help me so that i can stop banging my head against a wall.

My Scaleo pc has a GWA-4163B dvd-rw burner installed. from reading the other posts i gather this is an oem LG model.

Problem is the pc running xp does not recognise it as a dvd burner, it will play dvd's but if yo put a blank disc in it does not recognise it (either - or +) nero does not recognise it either. if you check the drives properties with a blank disc in it comes up with a full blue pie chart, ie no free space but classes the space at 0 bytes, it also states that the file system is raw, is that correct?

i have deleted the driver and updated to the latest one but thi makes no difference.

would appreciate any thoughts or comments.

cheers

That sounds about right. Don't try burning with XP's built in burning support - it is fairly crappy. Use a proper burning program like Nero for that.

A useful tip is that if you are just doing tests to see if the burner works properly, get hold of DVD+RW (or DVD-RW) disc and use that to do your burning tests. That way if it fails, you can always erase the disc and use it again. You won't have to waste discs and money on those tests. You can move on to normal DVD+/-R discs when you are reasonably sure everything is ok.

El correcte!

Windows doesn't support DVD native yet (except DVD-RAM).

Didn't he mention that Nero doesn't recognize it either? Which of course may just mean he needs an updated version, since he didn't mention which version he has.

Not really. If it's a bundled Nero version, he needs a retail or OEM version anyway. The outcome is the same.

Yes, he definitely mentioned it chef. Though, Dervish99, as others have said, please try updating the the newest version of Nero6 and see if that helps.

Hmm.. I somehow missed reading that. Well, let's hope it is the version of Nero he is using.

thanks for all the advice guys, i am using Nero 3 se which came bundled with the pc. so i need nero 6 then? is this the best software or are there any better alternatives??

thanks for your help

Jesus, that version is from the stone-age.
Use Nero 6.6.0.18 or the latest version 7.x.

Better alternatives are DVDDecrypter, ImgBurn, ImgBurnTool, CopyToDVD...
Or just switch to Linux and use k3b.

Yup, that sounds like the source of your problems.

Short version :
-----------------------
Update to Nero 6.6.0.18 quick!

Long version :
----------------------
See, Nero 3 might not even work with DVD writers! It might so old that it was written only for CD writers back then.

Also, certain earlier versions of Nero which did work with DVD writers had a list of supported DVD writers which the author had to update when a new writer was released. This was later changed so that Nero auto detected the features of each writer, meaning any new writer should work with it. Your version might be one before the change, meaning your writer is too new and not in the list of supported DVD writers.