DVDRW Drive won't burn DVD+R Windows 7

[xenolith]

This is with a Lite-On LH-20A1L DVDRW drive. I burned DVD+R disks just fine when I first built the system, but that was a few months ago. I haven't had to burn a DVD since then and somewhere along the way something happened to mess it up. The things I have tried:

• The drive reads DVDs perfectly fine.
• The drive burns data on 48X CD-ROM disks perfectly fine.
• Uninstalled/reinstalled the drive in device manager.
• Checked for and installed the drive's latest drivers.
• Installed the drive's latest firmware.
• Tried three different brands of DVD+R disks w/same bad result.
• Tested the drive in two other systems, Vista 64 and Windows 7, and it burned data on the same DVD+R disks perfectly fine.

This is what happens when I put an empty DVD+R in the drive to burn a data disk, no problem so far, the drive recognizes the media and I select "Like a USB flash drive" in the pop-up.

But then, it tries to "format" the disk and it goes on forever, never completing.

It's not until I eject the disk that it's stops trying to format and I get the following obvious pop-up error message, "Windows was unable to complete the format."

So lets look at what happens when I try a new DVD+R disk with the other option "With a CD/DVD player."

As it should, Windows opens an explorer window that allows me to drag-n-drop the data files I want to burn onto the disk. When I click "burn disk" the drive looks to be burning the data just fine and I start to think I'm home free now, but just when it is about to finish I get the following pop-up error message, "There was an error burning the disc. The disc might no longer be usable." What the @#&%%#?!!!

I also tried the third party program ImgBurn, but it fails at the very end of the process too, like that above.

I try to go as far as I can to solve an issue, but this has really kicked my butt.

Has anybody come across such a problem? Am I missing something stupidly obvious? I really dislike reinstalling Windows if I don't have to, especially if there is no guarranty it will fix the problem.

Thank you for any input you can kindly provide.

 

[MadScientist]

What is your SATA operational mode set to in your bios? If AHCI or RAID try changing it to IDE.

 

[xenolith]

Thanks MadScience, that appears to have fixed it. I can burn a DVD now.

I can remember that the SATA mode was set to AHCI after reading that it improves performance with SSDs. As you can probably tell, I have two SSDs.

Now I wonder if this will also solve the BSOD I very occasionally get (2 times a month) that are always caused by ntoskrnl.exe?

 

[MadScientist]

From Wikipedia:
ntoskrnl.exe (and ntkrnlpa.exe on systems with Physical Address Extension support) is the kernel image for the family of Microsoft Windows NT operating systems. It provides the Kernel and Executive layers of the Windows NT kernel space, and is responsible for various system services such as hardware virtualization, process and memory management, etc., thus making it a fundamental part of the system. It contains the Cache Manager, the Executive, the Kernel, the Security Reference Monitor, the Memory Manager, and the Scheduler, among other things.

A ntoskrnl.exe BSOD can be caused by a number of things, bad drivers, left over drivers from an upgrade install, bad or mis-matched memory, corrupt ntoskrnl.exe file, corrupt boot.ini file, hardware, etc.

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http://www.pchelpforum.com/blue-screen-errors/