My LITE-ON LDW-411S DVD+/-R recorder is having problems recognising recordable DVD disks. Whenever I load a blank DVD-R or DVD+R into the drive (regardless of the media’s brand) the label for the DVD drive in ‘My Computer’ changes from ‘DVD-RW Drive’ to ‘CD Drive’ and reports that there is 0 bytes data. Then, when attempting to copy data onto the DVD a message appears that the disk is full. The same error occurs regardless of which burning software is used (e.g., Windows Explorer, Alcohol 120%, Nero, and CloneCD). The drive can play DVDs and CDs correctly. The computer is a PIII 733 MHz with 256 MB RAM running Windows XP.

Firstly, you must make sure the software you are using supports writing to DVDs. The Windows XP inbuilt CD writing software does not support writing DVDs, nor does CloneCD (you need a different software package called CloneDVD) and if you have an older version of Nero this may not support DVD writing either. However, Alcohol 120% has always supported DVD writing, so this should work. It is generally not a good idea to have several CD/DVD writing software packages installed on a computer at the same time (in case this causes a conflict) so I suggest that as a first step you uninstall all CD/DVD writing software and then install the software which came with your DVD recorder. If the problem persists under this configuration, there is another procedure we can try. On 3rd October 2003, a device support patch was released for Alcohol 120% which adds support for your model of DVD recorder (forum.alcohol-software.com/index.php?showtopic=6765). I am unsure if you can just download the patch (by logging into their website), or whether you have to download the latest version of Alcohol 120%. Check out www.alcohol-software.com. Please let me know if these suggestions fix the problem. Unfortunately, apart from these suggestions I am unsure of how to proceed apart from reinstalling Windows.