PC help please! CD burning question

Ross

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Hi folks, I have a fairly good PC and am quite used to burning music CD's on it. I use a varying range of blank CD's, from no-name CDR's to TDK Audio CD's. Now, my future father-in-law has asked me to make a CD for him, I managed to get all the tracks and went into my Roxio CD Creator as normal to burn the CD but as soon as I place the files in the area to be burnt, I get 'Roxio CD Creator has encountered an error and needs to close'. Annoying.
I went to the Roxio site and downloaded the latest drivers, installed them, restarted, same thing happens! I cant think of any software I've installed recently that should affect it either! I tried using Windows Media Player to burn the CD but got the same thing.

Does this sound like a problem with the CD burner? or a software problem.
I would appreciate any help and of course will provide further information as required.

Many thanks

Ross
 

jtice

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That does seem odd, seeing how you tried it on WMP also.

I use NERO,,, which is hands down, the very best burning software out there. But I here Roxio is very good also.

Have you tried different CDs?
Have you tried burning something else? (not the files you get errors with)

It might be a corrupt file you are trying to burn, although it should say that in the error message.
 

was_jlh

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Ross, which ver of windows you running? ( XP, 98, etc ).

When you go into windows explorer, can you "see" your cd-writer drive?

Joe
 

Ross

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I use XP, I do seem to have 3 drives (D, E & F) which is a bit strange seeing as though I only have a CD drive and a DVD CD RW.....what would this be?

Ross
 

jtice

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Yep, thats strange, see if it still shows all those after a reboot.

Will your dvd-cd rw even read cds?
 

x-ray

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I recently had a similar experience with Easy CD Creator. Downloaded a few MP3's from Kazaa (shhh /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif) and half way through the burning process encountered an error (sometimes the burning software would completely crash).

Turned out one of the MP3 files was corrupt in some way (even though it played ok on the pc) I found out by a process of trial and error running test burns (making a cd image on the hard drive). As soon as I deleted and downloaded a different version of that one file everything worked ok.
 

tiktok 22

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[ QUOTE ]
I use XP, I do seem to have 3 drives (D, E & F) which is a bit strange seeing as though I only have a CD drive and a DVD CD RW.....what would this be?


[/ QUOTE ]

I use Nero also. It's the best. It sounds like you might have an image drive installed. It's for copying a disc or files to your HDD to be recorded later. It's not really a drive. Just looks that way.
 

Klaus

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Ross,

the additional drive might be a "virtuel" one installed by your burning software - check your properties for that - you might have a new SCSI controller you never heard of /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif

I had something similar happen with my old CD-RW drive before - it stopped working with WinOnCD - I put Nero (recommended) on it - worked - only to start behaving wired a couple of months later - now even the drive gets only recognized on boot once in a while - it somehow slowly died - burning my CD-Rs now with the DVD+RW too /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/crazy.gif

Check the following:

See if the error only happens with that specific music to see if really a corrupt file is the root cause - I don´t believe this as the burning software normally doesn´t care WHAT its writing to the CD anyway in most cases.

If it fails with other stuff to be burned as well you might try a new burning SW - as above you might try Nero - there´s a trial - version you can download for free from www.nero.com - at least it was last time I checked.

If it still fails and you are sure you didn´t change anything in hardware or software since last time it worked AND you didn´t fiddle around with your BIOS settings chances are your drive (or somethign else) is dead or dying.

You might try to loan a new CD-R drive to see if it works then.

If you are under time - pressure we can arrange something for your father-in-law if you want - you need to email me the files or we have to find some upload area for it (if you have MP3 files we are fine as those are small) and I will burn those to a CD for you and sent it over to UK. I´m on DSL flatrate and the media is cheap - no problem though.

Cheers

Klaus
 

Ross

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Klaus, what a generous gesture! That is very kind of you to offer, I will try everything else first but I have a feeling I have a corrupted file somewhere, I have a DVDRW which I'm going to try writing the files too, 1 at a time.
The other drive is indeed a virtual one. Should have noticed that...
Fortunately there is no time pressure so I will try all your suggestions first and let you know.

I love this place!!

Ross
 

Saaby

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This is an offbeat suggestion and Jtice will flame me but that's ok. I'm not sure if they'll let you download it in the UK but Apple's iTunes will burn CDs. Might try it just for kicks to see what happens?

Download Page
 

jtice

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STOP PUSHING APPLE ON PORR ROSS !!!


You will have to excuse "Maccy", he has a desease. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/jpshakehead.gif

But if you have tried a few diff. programs, your burner drivers might be messed up,,, but wait,,, you said you did that also.. well geeeez, your not having any luck. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/frown.gif
 

GeoffChan

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what version of Roxio are you running?

I had a problem with Roxio (5 and 6) and a new Sony 510 Dvd burner.

I fixed my problem by installing Nero 6.

Geoff
 

Ross

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I'm running Roxio 5 and I may try getting hold of Nero 6 instead. I'm going to try burning the files 1 by 1 to a DVDRW and see if it is one of them which is corrupt - I have a feeling it may be this.
If I feel in an 'apple' mood I may try Itunes!!

Thanks guys

Ross
 

Klaus

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[ QUOTE ]
Ross said:
.. snip .. getting hold of Nero 6 instead. .. snip .. Ross

[/ QUOTE ]

CLICKIE

Klaus
 

Ross

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/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/bowdown.gif /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/bowdown.gif /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/bowdown.gif /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/thumbsup.gif
 

Charles Bradshaw

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I have always used Nero, and have 5.x OEM (came with my Cyberdrive CDRW burner). Also never had a problem with it, though I don't burn audio. I just use my burner for data CDs.
 

binky

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Nero may also quit working for you after a while, though I sure hope it doesn't.

Here's the deal with burning CD's and such that I've discovered on my Windows 2000 machine with Adaptec's CD burning software. (Some of the following is fact, some is more like "I suppose it must have been due to...")

My CD burner used to work flawlessly. Then one time that I needed to duplicate a Dr. Seuss CD game of my son's that was getting badly scratched up the darned thing just wouldn't work. I had recently gone through WindowsUpdate, so here's why I'm going to blame Microsoft, but I think I'm right.

When you're burning a CD you there's a lot that goes on with prioritizing time on the machine and getting the data flowing into the drive without failure. There is also some buffering that takes place all over the place, in RAM, in the CD's incoming cache, and probably other places. When you update or load ANYTHING on your machine there's always a risk that you'll be replacing some '.dll' file that was shared or otherwise needed by your CD burning software. If the overwriting version of the .dll being put into your OS doesn't have the same optimization that the CD burner uses, or doesn't demand the same priority ("High", "Realtime", whatever) then your burning will fail.

So that's a long-winded way of saying that if you've tried the usual options, you should try also uninstalling & reloading your CD software from scratch and if you're asked during the reload "An [older/newer] file with the same name exists. Do you want to overwrite it?" you're gonna have to click "Yes" in order to get back the file with the right optimization for your CD burner. Now, this might reintroduce a .dll that was recently patched to close a security hole or other error, but that's a problem with any OS that uses shared files in this way (and most do).

YMMV. /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif

Good luck with this!
 

Ross

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Thanks Peter, still havent got to the bottom of this so I am looking to starting from scratch. Interesting explanation as well - didnt know any of that!

Ross
 
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