>>Happy New Year Folks.
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>>My CD drive has recently decided not to recognise any proprietory disc, i.e. any software or games disc. OTOH any disc that has info burned onto it domestically, such as backups, copies of prop. s/w discs, is readable.
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>>Any attempt to explore a prop. disc results in a dialog: "Please insert disc in drive d:" with a cancel button (note no Retry button).
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>Are you sure you recognize a pattern? I.e., that after six proprietary discs it still does recognize one of your homemade discs?

No I haven't noticed a pattern. Just about a month ago my daughter complained that the puter wouldn't recognise her Harry Potter game any more. I tried her Barbie Nutcracker and got same. I was too busy and dismissed it as a "this boot-up" glitch that will go away. Just recently I got a game and found out that this is the situation for all prop. discs now
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>I've had the experience with a bunch of different drives, that if there's one bad disc (dirty, scratched), the OS (Windows, that is) won't recognize any disc for quite a while, until the next reboot. Some bad bit gets stuck, and it keeps thinking the bad disc is still in, no matter what you do.

So was recognising any disc which I've written to but not others. Reboot doesn't work.

I've bought a new DVR RW now and no probs (except it's not sure about non-prop discs now! - esp. those that may have been written to under W98). But I'd still like to have the CD drive as the "source" drive when burning to the DVD RW, say, backups of my prop. discs.