I have a several different CDRW drives I have tried and none of them will read or write to a CDR CD. they are memorex cd-r and two of the four drives I tried are even the same brand as the cd's. its like the computer doesnt even recognize that there is a CD in it, yet they all will play music and game CD's. whats up with this? does anybody know? do I HAVE to have CD-RW cd's for a CD-RW drive? I was under the usumption that CD-R disc would work in them also. if someone could help me out with this I would be very happy! thanx.

something a bit strnage there !!! All cdr-rw drives should read CD disks... The only issue that I know of if someone uses direct cd function from the Ez CD Crator suite to write dirctly to the cd, in that case you would need the IN CD function which is normaly part of the burning software to read them... About the only thing i can suggest to you is make sure you have all the 98 updates installed on your computer, as there were some fixes for the OS in repsect to CD / dvd burner support. But I doubt if that is causing a problem though.. IF IT AINT BROKE, DONT FIX IT A8N-SLI Deluxe AMD X64 3500+ Wnchst Corsair 2x512 DDR400 Dual Channel GV-NX6600128D PCIX Graphics Card Ggbyte GT Pro CPU Cooler Zalman VF700-CU VGA Cool

Make sure your CD burner says rewritable on it. Then it's a CD burner not just a drive. Your CDR should take CD, CD-R, CD-RW also CD+R, and CD+RW. Yes Windows media player will install Roxio CD burning progam. But one of the best is NERO burning software downloadable from many places. If you are just doing music Nero 6 will do. For CDs and DVDs the simple smaller one is Nero 6.6 but the newest burning program is Nero 7.0 . Nero 6.6 and 7.0 offer INCD another nice program especially for formatting and DRAG and DROP from one drive to another burner drive instantly without downloading. If you can't find it I could put it somewhere and send you a link. By the way, you are running two drives of some sort at the same time,(right?). If so then you do have the jumpers on one as master and the other as slave (right?). IDE cable notches up red line on IDE toward access side? Yellow power wire closest to you? Crunch

I suspect that your problem may be the way that you have the drives configured on the IDE.

We can assume that you DO have burning software installed (Nero, CD Creator or whatever)???

well in answer to the last question, no I dont... but I thought I could drag and drop or copy paste to the cd drive. crunch asked if my drive was rewriteable, YES all four I tried are, I also have a DVD player in the same machine that works fine. all the CD-RW drives played CD's but didn't recognize anything being there when a blank CD-R disc was in the drive it acted like it was empty. do I have to have burn software to do this? sorry for my dumbness its my first try doing this. thanks for all your help!

"all the CD-RW drives played CD's but didn't recognize anything being there when a blank CD-R disc was in the drive" Are you talking about in Windows Explorer? That's normal behavior when you put blank media in a CD/DVD burner.