Can’t Burn a DVD?
I had an interesting occurence yesterday when a friend called me and told me he had a hard time burning a DVD. He mentioned that the message he was getting was that he didn’t have enough space on his hard drive. What he would do is rip it from the DVD onto his hard drive, then burn it to a CD.
I asked him what he was running and he quickly told me XP. I thought the fastest way I could help him would be for him to bring his computer to the lab and I could troubleshoot much easier.
Getting Started
Once we set it up and fired it up I knew it was an older machine. He was running a 1.4 GHZ celeron with 128MB of RAM. As you can imagine I immediately told him that he needed some updating if this were a machine he was using full time.
Actually he said he only used it to burn DVD personal backup copies. He doesn’t sell them on eBay or anything.. I know him quite well.
I actually called a freind of mine who is pretty computer savvy and we both troubleshot the issue. First we checked out his hard drive and realized he was using the max capacity of just under 40GB. When further inspecting, we noticed he had little to nothing installed. That didn’t make sense.
We quickly started narrowing down where the space was being taken starting by right clicking on ”Documents and Settings” and selecting properties. Sure enough, whatever it was was in there!
Ah Ha!
We found the culprit in a temp file. It was a bunch of old DVD’s he had already burned but didn’t delete. We simply deleted them out and he was good to go!
I knew he had a laptop as well, one that was a lot faster than this stone age desktop and I asked him why he wasn’t using that to burn. He told me it didn’t come equipped with a DVD burner.
I offered to research one for him as he didn’t have a clue he could easly swap out his CD ROM drive. He was pretty excited!
His laptop is an HP but i’m not sure of the model. It should be pretty easy to find once I start looking however, I did tell him an external burner is also an option.
ME, XP, Vista, Windows 7
HAD VISTA. WENT BACK TO XP.
ON WMP 11 IN VISTA, I USED TO BE ABLE TO BURN MOVIES ONTO MY DVDS (DVD-RW..)
NOW IN WMP 11 IN XP, I CAN’T DO IT. WHEN I PRESS BURN, AND PUT IN A DVD, NOTHING HAPPENS AT THE TOP RIGHT HAND CORNER. IT DOESN’T SHOW THE DVD NOR HOW MUCH SPACE IS LEFT.
HOWEVER, IF I PUT IN A CD , IT RECOGNIZES THE CD FOR BURNING. (OF COURSE A CD CAN’T BE USED FOR MOVIES BECAUSE OF THE LACK OF SPACE.)
IS THIS A FUNCTION THAT IS NOT IN WMP 11 FOR XP, BUT IT IS IN WMP 11 FOR VISTA?
HAVE ASKED SOME TECHNICIANS. THEY DON’T KNOW A, AHD MICROSOFT IS NOT REALLY CLEAR ABOUT IT.
THANK YOU.
My optical drive on my Dell computer has a logo of DVD R/RW and on the DVD/CD-ROM drives has TSST corp DVD+-RW TS H653A. I am trying to copy (or burn) photos to a DVD but I keep getting a message that it can not read the CD format. Shouldn’t I be able to copy to a DVD? Please help!!
Som DVD burning problems can be driver related. Try updating all your drivers using Driver Inspector http://www.officialdrivers.com
Logan
thanks
i would just want to ask that whenever i’ll be buying anew dvd which is + rw my dvd drive is not recognizing it as if it is not new. how can i fix it?
dear logan:
i’ve download some application softwares on my pc but i can’t burn it on my dvds (dvd+rw)…so how is it???????????