Hi ppl I brought a brand new LITE-ON DVDRW Combo drive and installed it in place of my Philips CD-RW drive, everything seems fine, My machine recognises the drive, device manager says the device is working properly, the light flashes when I put in CDs/DVDs, I can hear it spinning and it even opens the files on CDs/DVDs with no problem. The problem is when I put in blank CDs/DVDs, the drive tells me to Please insert a disk into drive E:. as if nothing is in there, using my old drive I was able to put in blank CDs and it would simply acknowledge a CD is in there and display an empty disk with free space, I am quite baffled, I don't understand why this is happening, the jumpers are securely attached, I've used the install CD that came with the drive and even installed third party software like PowerDVD, still no luck. The drive itself seems to be working like it should. I'm worried that if it can't recognise blank media than I would not be able to burn CD-Rs/DVD-Rs. If you could help me out here guys, your advice would be much appreciated. Thanks.

What happens when you open your CD burning s/w and put a disc in? You say that with the old drive the system displayed an empty disk with free space, what was the nature of the display - My Computer or ???

Big_Ed Please do not double post the same query in two different forums. I have 3 optical drives in this machine. I tried the reader with blank media and the drive gave an error. The other 2 drives are burners. Both opened my burner software and after closing the software they both did display a disc capacity, although only 648MB. I suspect this may have something to do with the burner software. Do you have any third party burner software installed?

Hi, Well Grok, I did try testing with the burning software to see if it was able to burn anything on the blank media, to my surprise it DID burn a CD-RW perfectly, guess I'll have to get used to this new method instead of the old 'drag & drop' via My Computer which also displayed stats and physically opened the media to reveal it's empty. OtheHill, I apologize for the the double-posting, but I posted in two different forums because the hardware forum looks pretty much dead, but appropriate, whereas the XP forum is lively and tends to attract a different group of visitors. Anyway I do have third party burner software and did not have this problem before, but guess I could live with inserting blank media when prompted by the s/w. Thanks again for your suggestions.

You must have been using CD-RW disks and had software that formats blank CD-RW on the fly as you use it. And the new software does not support that option.

I think you may be right JackG, I'll try some different burning software and see which one is best. Thx for the input.