I've been using this DVD writer (PIONEER/SONY DVR-109) and PRINCO +R media successfully for about 6-8 months now and everything has been working fine. The writers firmware was 1.00. The media was disc 40+ in a spindle of 100, so it should be part of the same batch... BTW, my notebook computer which also burns +R discs still processes these discs normally. Two nights ago, after installing a trial versions of "VIDEO REDO PLUS" and TMPGenC DVD Author) my burner (the PIONEER DVR-109) stopped recognizing blank +R media. It still burns -R and -RW as it was designed. I don't "BELIEVE" the software install(s) has any bearing on this issue, I just included it because of the installtion timing. My first thought. Upgrade the FIRMWARE. I downloaded and installed V1.58 of the firmware for the DVD and it still would not recognize the PRINCO 4X +R media but continued to burn other media (PRINCO -R 4x and DVD-/+ RW) OK, so I decided the DVR-109 writer was a little old and max 8x speed, so I went to Fry's and bought a Matshita/Panasonic SW9585 ($59) (16x/16x/8x/6x/4x) which supports everything and burns DVD-RAM to boot. I replaced the DVR-109 with the Matshita / PANASONIC and the new drive also will not recognize the PRINCO 4x DVD +R media. Any Ideas why this "JUST STOPPED" working? Sony Vaio VGC-RA840G XP/MCE 2005 2.8GHz x 2 Dual Processor 2GB Memory 500GB SATA / 320GB NAS / 200GB USB
have you tried any other +R media? If it used to work with the Princo.... which by the way is not the greatest of media (Verbatim, Taiyo Yuden, Sony, Maxel, the ones made in Japan)....I don't know why it would suddenly stop working unless some settings were changed. If you want, uninstall those programs that you recently installed, do a windows clean up, empty temp folders, defrag the drive, do a registry clean up and then do a cold reboot. After all that then I would check out those +Rs again. That's the only way to see if those programs did something to your computer to make your drive not recognize what used to be recognized! good luck.
Unfortunately I don't have any other +R media to test with. I did test with -R (which my DVR uses) and -RW that I have for a general purpose quick copy. I'm currently reflashing my O/S and will test using a pristine system install. (Isn't ACRONIS great!) I'll let you know what happens.
Well, I reloaded my base O/S with no other software installed and the media still goes "undetected" and un recognizable. It appears I've been lucky till now and the PRINCO media must be part of a bad batch which just happened to start in the middle of a 100 count spool. thanks for your help and insite. I'm currently restoring my system back to "current"
