Richard Hopkins wrote:
"Edward Diener No Spam" wrote in
message...

I specifically set the master and slave drive jumpers for my DVD
drives but without any difference.


That's not surprising. Provided you are using an 80 wire cable,
jumpering the drives as Cable Select *is* the de facto "correct"
jumpering method for the majority of motherboards and drives the
majority of the time.

I am right, am I not, that I put the blank DVD in the drive with the
label
side up to burn it, just as I do with a normal DVD to read it ?


Without knowing anything about the particular drive model you've bought,
one would very much imagine so, yes.

It is so mysterious to me that while everything looks good and
DeepBurner acts like it is burning an image on the DVD...


I've never heard of either of the utilities you mention. One good
diagnostic step to follow would be using something known to be good.
Nero would be as good a choice as anything.

Is there any software that will test a DVD writer and report back
if something is wrong with it and what it might be ?


Nero and Alcohol 120% both include diagnostic/test utilities. I daresay
there are others.

I downloaded the Nero trial and attempted to burn a DVD. Nero hung on me and I
could not even kill the program, not could I remove the DVD from the drive. By
hang I meran that it said it was burning the Disk but nothing was happening. I
made sure I was burning only a small number of files, which should have taken a
very small amount of time. Finally I hit the reset button after 15 minutes or
so, and rebooted and was able to remove the DVD from the drive.

After I rebooted I tried Nero's Test Drive feature but everything is grayed out
and I can not even run a test. Nero Test Drive does show Disk Info but that is
all. Maybe because it is the trial version it does not let me test the drive.
Mysterious, eh ?


There are a variety of potential explanations currently on the table,
from duff software to a faulty drive. If you can try some known decent
writing software that'd be a start.

Well Nero doesn't work. It's hard to see what is wrong if no writing software
can actually test the drive.


Incidentally, have you tried using this drive to write a CD-ROM or CD-RW?

I bought DVD-RW 4x disks. I can buy some CD-RW disks, or even some other type (
DVD+-R or CD+-R ) or a different make of disks ( the current is Pleomax from
Samsung also ), but I feel like I am going to be going around in circles
spending money worthlessly. All the software appears to recognize the drive, and
the media in it, but as soon as I try to actually burn anything onto the media,
"that's all she wrote". What hardware, stops everything dead without so much as
a message or anything g.

I have contacted Samsung, but it will probably be days before I even hear
anything from them, and then the inevitable questions, and try this and that
etc. I admit I am pretty disgusted as this is my first foray into any kind of
CD/DVD burner and it is not working at all even though everything looks fine on
the surface.