I have a 5-year-old Sony VAIO PC (model RSV-511P, Windows XP SP2) with a DW-U14A DVD recorder on board. I recently bought a spindle of 50 Ridata x4 DVD+RW discs, and I was planning on burning some avi movies onto them. When i first popped in some of these disks into the tray, the drive was not recognizing them at all, so I upgraded the firmware from 2.0c to 2.0e hoping I'd get some better compatibility. I thought it did resolve the problem at first, the drive recognized the disk and everything, but when i would try to pull it up in my computer it took quite a while to come up, and the drive would sometimes be listed as DVD RW and other times as CD RW. I actually used my crappy DVD Santa software to burn a dvd onto it, the whole process went smooth but when it was done at the end, it's like the drive is not recognizing any files on it, just says its blank (even though I can see the new coloration on the actual disk, so I'm guessing the files did burn onto it). Should I upgrade the firmware even further into one of the DRU models? If so which one?
Thanks with any help guys
your burner is now 5 yrs old! You already did an firmware update on it! I would try some DVD+R, 8x disks and see if you have better results. If you don't then I suggest you buy a new burner for better disk recognition and burning strategies with the newer media out there. If you burn to a DVD-RW disk then make sure it's a 2.4x disk. That should work with your old burner. good luck.
