My dvd-rw won't write on dvds anymore, it only burns cd's. I use Nero 6, I have this laptop for a year and it burned cds and dvds without a problem. What puzzles me is that windows detected and installed the driver for NEC ND 6650A. On Packard Bell website I found that this laptop has a NEC ND 6500A. Packard Bell doesn't have any driver for the dvd-rw unit on their website. I tried to download one of this drivers from the net but I couldn't find any of them, only firmware. Also, when I downloaded the drivers for my wireless device I found out that on my laptop it was a different wireless board then the one mentioned on the site. I used my laptop's serial number to indentify the product. What should I do? Is this a software related issue of my optical drive is broken? Should I try to reinstall the operating system?

Well go to the device manager and uninstall the DVD drive and also the IDE controllers windows then should detect the new hardware and install the driver needed. Also on the device manager it will give you a description or manufactor on the drives themselves, you might be able to go to their websites and update the from there. Jim R

Combination drives have two lasers for burning. One for burning DVD's and one for burning CD's. It is very possible that you have a defective drive. I would try and find a DVD drive that you can test in your system to see if that is the problem.

The Hardware Drivers are not the Problem. Windows XP has and installs the correct drivers for the DVD drive. The problem could be one of 2 possabilities: 1st Nero 6, may not have the software to burn DVD's , this is just a guess. I'm not fimiliar with Nero 6 software to know. 2nd The DVD burner may ( there again I don't Know) have the ability to burn DVD R- and RW- or it may be able to burn DVD R+ and RW+. But if you are using the wrong DVD Disk it will not work. To give an example: Your DVD is a DVD R- & RW- and the DVD Disk's you are trying to burn with are DVD R+ & RW+. This will not work!!

Well, I tried to reinstall the driver from the device manager. I reinstalled Nero 3 times, I cleaned the registries every time. The manufacturer is NEC and on the website I found only firmware. I don't think it it's about the DVDs I used, because I burned on the same kind of DVDs before, but I will give it a try and change the DVDs type. My husband had the same problem with his dvd-rw and after we tried to see if it works even in Linux we decided to buy a new optical device. In this case, should a firmware be a good idea?

Firmware upgrades are used to solve a problem you may be having with the drive or the functions a drive performs. In your case the drive does not work. Almost assuredly a firmware upgrade will do little or nothing to solve the problem you are having. DVD drives (and CD drives) do fail occassionally. In this case the fact that you can burn CD's but not DVD'd tells me that you probably have a defective drive. The type of media mentioned above sometimes is a problem but most burner drives today will burn either the + or - type of disks. It has been that way for at least the last two years. I would see if you can either borrow or buy another drive to see if it works in your system.