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I am asking because I know Dell is going to give me a problem.

How do I know if my DVD drive in my laptop is broken? I burned 4 DL discs and they ALL failed, I called Dell and they suggested using Roxio. I used it and burned 1 disc without error and the 2nd disc with an error. With both applications there were no noticeable issues during the burning process. They only failed during the verification process.

Some of these bad discs dont work on other PCs and one locks up windows when I click a specific file.

Does that sound like a broken burner to you guys? When I called Dell they told me, since it can read discs properly 100% of the time and software doesnt fail in the burning process, its not a broken drive. They forward me to software support who demand a fee (i think $100) to help me fix my software. I am annoyed because I dont want to be on the phone for them to watch me burn a DVD and since I burned it once correctly I dont want to happen to burn correctly again to have them say they solved my problem (doing nothing) and charge me refusing to refund.

-edit- The errors I got were

1) The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error
2) Windows locking up when opening 1 specific file
3) Cannot copy : Data error (crc)
NOTE: the file that causes the problems is random with every disc
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  • I think you have bad sectors on your HDD. When you burn it sometimes fails bebause it cannot read a file(or the cached version of the file) (Hint: Cannot copy : Data error (CRC)) Shouts to me HDD CANNOT READ DATA.. so bufferunderun.. failed disc. The dvd drive is most likely fine!.. Run HDDScan (google it) and test you hdd.. You can buy me a coke .. mmmmmmmmmm
    – Piotr Kula
    Feb 2, 2012 at 21:24

3 Answers 3

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I think this is problem with DVD burner or DVD media

You can try burning DVD from some Live Linux distribution for check if DVD burner driver is OK. Or another DVD media from another producer. (My recommendation is TDK or Verbatim)

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  • 1
    +1 for suggesting another OS to use. It helps to rule out issues with the OS as well.
    – Isxek
    Aug 12, 2009 at 22:04
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If it is not the drive, you may have a bad batch of DL DVD-R's. Try a different set (package) of disks and see what happens. Drives do go flakey though, so you may still have a bad drive.

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Ok try these steps:

  1. Download CD Burner XP
  2. Burn standard data CD and verify the burn continue to next step if ok
  3. Burn standard data DVD and verify the burn, continue to next step if ok
  4. Burn Dual Layer data DVD and verify the burn, continue to the next step if ok
  5. Create ISO image of the CD and DVD using the Copy Disk function and to disk in dialog box

If these steps all work, then Hardware and OS seem fine. If any of them fail then you will need to use a friend to burn you a good Linux Live CD as per MicTech suggestion. This will then ensure that the OS is not the problem and concentrate on the actual hardware.

You may also want to burn at the lowest speed possible to ensure you can burn successfully. Your media maybe labeled 16x but that does not mean it can burn accuratly at 16x. I guess this is the price for mass produced cheap media! YMMV tho :)

If you can burn the standard (ie single layer) cd and DVD then it is just a bad batch of DL DVD Media.

Hope this helps!

Note: For Step 4 I would suggest going out and buying a brand new single Dual Layer DVD for this test to rule out your already non-working media.

Update: Just so you know, I stay away from DL media as I have always had problems when moving to that 2nd layer. I will just go BRay when I need high density disks!

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