I have had this problem for long time (and using maybe 5-6 different brands of CDs) - so it is not the hardware nor the media. Always on Win-XP Home edition. This happens about 50% of the time for me and it is getting frustrating and expensive: 1. I put a blank CD in the drive. 2. WinXP recgonizes the CD and pops up the explorer window (blank of course) (if I go to my computer, and right click on the CD-drive E: and look at properties, I see the the disk has 0 bytes used, 702 MB free ) 3. I drag the files (say 600Mb worth) into the CD Drive (E:) window 4. I click the option (on the left side of the explorer window) that says "Write these files to CD" ... 5. It prompts me for the CD name and I click next 6. The status bar says it is writing to CD ... 7. then after 10-15 mins I get the message "Cannot Complete the CD Writing Wizard" .. There was an error in the writing process, the disc may nolonger be usable" 8. When I check the disk properties - there are now 0 bytes free ... or sometimes 0 bytes used and 0 bytes free. Nothing I can do will write the the disk and I need to toss it. AGAIN - this happens on many different computers with many different brands of disks (so it cannot be a hardware problem, or bad luck with disks). The Windows CD wizard works about 50% of the time. (so therefor I am wasting half the disk and hours of time). *** this is not just with the CD wizard - I have tried 4 different CD writing programs aside from just the Winxp CD wizard (Nero, Roxio, DirectCD and a freeware one) .. again, on 6 different computers and many different brands of CDs. Half the CDs are now expensive coasters as a result. What am I doing wrong? How can I correct this. (ie I am looking for settings etc, not for someone to sell me new software). Thanks

Might be that the drive is going out. Might be that your drive is trying to burn too fast or some other setting is off. Might look also at bios for any settings like PI0 mode that may have been posted on this issue. "Best Practices", Event viewer, host file, perfmon, antivirus, anti-spyware, Live CD's, backups, are in my top 10

Or, instead of dragging the files to the drive, right-click and sendto. Then write the files. "So won’t you give this man his wings What a shame To have to beg you to see We’re not all the same What a shame" - Shinedown