My boss’s laptop is doing the weirdest thing ever. In device manager, it says it has a DVD-RW (which is also what the actual drive says on the door). When you open My Computer and look at the drives, it calls it a DVD-RW. When you put a writeable disk into it? The label changes to “CD ROM” and it forgets it ever was a DVD-RW. Ever heard of such a thing? He really needs to use it to burn some cds so he’s getting kind of annoyed…
He already tried updating the drivers and the firmware… no dice. Any ideas?
What happens if he actually tries to copy and paste files into it anyway? Most DVD-RW drives behave sort of like you describe when you insert a CD-R or CD-RW disk, only IME, the label changes to “CD-R”, not “CD-ROM” (Windows XP, SP1). And is he using CD-R media and not DVD-R or DVD+R media? Windows doesn’t know how to write to writeable DVD media. If you need to do that, you have to use Nero or Roxio or some other software capable of writing DVDs. If I insert a DVD-R, for example, my drive label changes to “CD Drive”.
After I burn a DVD (with Nero still open) Windows Explorer will show the drive as a CD-RW drive. After I close Nero (which has loaded its own ASPI driver), the drive returns to being a “DVD-RW” drive.
Many DVD burning programs need to be updated via the latest downloadable updates (usually available from manufs website) before they will recognize the latest drives.