Why does my DVD burner sometimes not recognize my drive

I am burning a DVD and I am using deepburner program. I have two drives on my computer, a CD-R and a DVD-R. Sometimes the program only regonizes the CD-R drive and not the DVD drive. So I downloaded another program called burn4free and I get the same problem, it doesn’t always recognize the DVD burner. What is the reason behind this? The burner is hooked up properly because I can play DVDs on it, so I don’t know what the problem is.