I have a ASUS DVD-1608P2S. It's about 3+ years old. It's been working flawlessly for years. About 6 months back, I made the mistake of buying Office Depot brand DVD-R media. The first 50 discs on the spindle seemed to actually burn well. I had a few coasters here or there, but nothing major. The final 50 discs on the spindle was another story. It seemed like I had to burn 4-5 discs to get one to burn properly. At first I chalked it up to crappy media, but then, even the discs that did burn properly became unreadable (after only 1 use). Today, I went out and bought a 100-pack spindle of Sony DVD+R (D21) which are supposedly 1st Class - Excellent discs (reference: http://www.digitalfaq.com/media/dvdmedia.htm). My first two burns using these discs appeared to be failures. I was burning Ubuntu 8.10 onto these discs using ImgBurn. ImgBurn was unable to verify after burning the 2 discs, but I thought, let me give em a go anyways. Attempting to explore the discs through windows showed there was nothing on them. When I restarted window and attempted to boot the computer using the Ubuntu discs, it booted into Ubuntu, but with problems. So I'm starting to wonder, is it really issue with the media or is the DVD burner finally dying? I can read regular DVD's fine, the issue has been with burning and reading burned media.
Some Office Depot branded media is actually fairly decent media and Sony for the most part is pretty good as well, so that being said, I would venture to say that your burner is about to kick the bucket. Or actually already has for the most part. You may try searching for updated firmware and see if that helps and if you want to post a burn log from ImgBurn for us to look at feel free to that as well. But with good burners able to be had for not much over $20.00, it may just be time to update. Could be a late Christmas present to yourself!
