Older CD-RW media works in old drive but not in new drive

[Hugh Jass]

I have several older CD-RW discs (Memorex 2X media) that I formatted, created and wrote to with my Dell Latitude C610 Notebook, which has the Samsung SN-308B CDRW-DVD (24x/8x/8x) combo drive. Those disks continue to be formatted, read and written to fine in that laptop and drive - using both DirectCD AND the built-in Windows CD writing tools.

I just purchased a new Dell 8250 which comes with the new Samsung SM-348B (48x/24x/16x) combo drive, and I am having problems with the SAME media that works fine in the other drive:

With DirectCD:

The new drive recognizes those same older disks fromatted by the older computer, and I can read the data written by my older computer. I can even use the new drive to write to the older media. However, I can't FORMAT the same older CD-RW disks in the new drive. During the DirectCD format, I get error messages, and the format quits. Again, though, I can format those same discs successfully in my older computer!

With the built-in Windows CD writing tools:

It recognizes the same disk/media as a CD-RW, but on some of the disks it won't read the data (shows disk as blank), and writes to the media don't "take" - always shows as blank.


The new drive works fine with newer, high speed media, but I really need to get it to format, read and write to these older disks!

I am running Windows XP on both machines, with all updates applied, and the latest Easy CD Creator/DirectCD 5.3 including the patch from the Dell Web site...

Can anyone help?

[dodecahedron]

personally i would stay away from Window's burning capabilities and use a burning application such as Easy CD Creator or Nero.

before trying to format an already formatted disc with DirectCD, i would suggest first ERASING the CDRW disc. Easy CD Creator lets you do this. do a Full Erase (not a Quick one). after that try to format the disc with DirectCD.

[jase]

This might be a hopeless persuit, I'm afraid.

Writing to low-speed discs with a high-speed writer can sometimes cause problems if they've been written to by a lower-speed writer first. The older writers tended to be less accurate and the pits sometimes wider and less well formed than a newer writer would deliver.

One possible solution would be to do a FULL erase of the media with the older writer, then attempt a format/write operation on the newer one. No guarantees but it can sort this kind of problem out. It's similar in principle (though the underlying reasons are different) to writing a low-density 5.25" floppy with a high-density drive after a low-density drive has been at it. Very unreliable.