[brummielad121]

Hi
I'm trying to work out if I have a problem or not!

I burned 40 DVD-Rs with around 30MB of data (I only had DVD-Rs to hand), and sent them to someone. However, they tell me that they - and their colleagues - find these to be blank, saying that the "CDs" (sic) come up empty, no files.

However, they read fine at my end, both on the PC that burned them (using Deepburner), and on another PC and Mac.

As far as I know the other guys are using XP (certainly PCs), but I have to tread rather delicately, and can't question them too much (work situation). I need to get them into a format that I know they will be able to read, so I'm trying to understand why this might not be possible with the disks burned to date - with neither me nor them being very technical!

I wonder if this is relevant: when I insert one of the DVDs, it comes up as a CD drive under properties, formatted to CDFS. (This is also the case for another DVD-R not burned by me, also readable at my end, so maybe not). By comparison, a DVD+R burned by someone else is designated also as a 'CD drive' but formatted to UDF.

I also have access to Nero Express - I tried burning using this, and at the end of the burn it characterises the DVD as book type DVD-R with 1 session burned, so that seems to be OK (still get that CD/ CDFS property, though) This was, incidentally, on a different PC to the first one used to burn the 40 disks but also using a DVD+-RW drive. Since the end result seems to be identical, I'm very reluctant to burn another set and trust that somehow the problem won't recur!

Is there anything I should be doing at this end to ensure greater compatibility? Why wouldn't someone else on XP be able to see files burned in this way?

Thanks for any help or advice.

 

[blah789]

If it's only 30MB, why not use a CD-R? Saves money (OK, maybe not that much) and you'll feel like you've wasted less space (670MB vs. 4GB).
I would ask the colleague to run Nero Info Tool from here
http://www.nero.com/enu/support-nero8-tools-utilities.html
It will tell them the characteristics of their drive (whether it can read +R or -R media etc.)

Generally speaking, it's best to burn with a dedicated CD burning program (like Nero) rather than with the built-in burning capabilities of windows explorer in XP and Vista.
Also, it's best to burn a disc-at-once (unless you plan on adding files later) rather than do multi-session disks.

Finally there's always the possibility of incompatible media. Usually optical drives's manuals will feature a list of brands of media that work well. For example my LG drive says for DVD-R use Maxell, and for DVD+R use Verbatim. It does matter, because when I used to burn with Maxell CD-R on my Lite-On drive, although the burn completed successfully, when I tried to copy back the data, I would get a lot of read errors - and that's after testing many CD-R's of that brand from different batches (fortunately I had another drive (LG) that burned them OK - though even then the discs didn't read well on the Lite-On anyhow). The point is, compatibility isn't 100%. You should check both drive brand and model (they usually have PDF manuals online) for your friend's drive.

 

[brummielad121]

Thanks for the useful info. You're right, CDs would have been more appropriate, but having used DVD-Rs I'm keen to discover what I may have done wrong, as there's bound to be a next time when I need to use them.

Unfortunately getting any kind of diagnostics from the other side is nigh-on impossible; the PCs there are locked down completely (no downloads), and in any case the user is even less technical than I am!

Was I barking up the wrong tree with the whole CDFS thing? I just find it weird that they aren't recognised at my end as a DVD, and seem to be burned using that format - but then again, I can read all the files just fine...

On the compatibility, I take your point about brands. It's just that in this case, it seems to be a binary situation - I can read them all, they can't read any of them...

One last question: is it common that PCs might be fitted with drives that don't read DVD-Rs (in a corporate environment)? If that's possible, it would certainly be a simple answer...!

 

[Coolfreak]

What type of data is it? I have come into a problem a few years ago where if there data is any type of movie file, this exact problem will happen. Sadly, I don't believe there is a solution to it. If it's not movie files, I am not really sure why this is happening.

 

[brummielad121]

It's a bunch of Excel and PDF files, so no movies. Thanks anyway.

 

[blah789]

If the problem is media compatibility, try burning one DVD-R of another brand, or burning DVD+R.
And yes, some workplaces only have CD-ROM drives to discourage any kind of DVD watching, or CD or DVD burning. Also keep in mind that at one time, DVD-R and DVD+R were incompatible formats. There was a format war between the two, much like Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. The war ended when most drives were made to read and write to both formats, but at one time, drives could only read one or the other, but not both (more of concern if your friend's computer is more than 3 years old).
When your friend inserts the media in the drive, does it detect the media at all? Like does it detect that there's a disc in the drive? (right click on the optical drive icon in my computer should tell)