Question : Problem: HP DVD Writer 740b will not burn DVD +R disks

I have an HP Media Center PC a1250n with an HP DVD RW Writer 740b with Lightscribe technology, and cannot get the DVD Writer to burn a DVD +R data disk using the installed Sonic  DigitalMedia Plus v7 (also called RecordNow) software.  

Actually, I hve gotten 2 good copies out after trying 16.  Sometimes it pops it out about 1/3 of the way through the copying process and often it goes all the way through (at least is says it has copied 4.1 GB of 4.1 GB) and then goes on for another 5 minutes or so trying to finish.  The drive motor slowly increases speed and then decreases over and over.  

The machine is about 14 months old and I have done a firmware update on the drive and the motherboard BIOS trying to fix this problem.  

The drive will read a CD, play a music CD, and play a comercial DVD.  It will NOT read a DVD RW disk that I wrote with the drive several months ago, even though the regular DVD Rom disk will read it.  

Could somebody help.
Thanks,
Bob

Answer : Problem: HP DVD Writer 740b will not burn DVD +R disks

There are different lasers used for pressed (commercial) discs and burned discs ... so the drive may simply have failed.   They're quite inexpensive these days, so it's easy to replace.

However, one thing you can try (considering the consistency of your problem, I doubt this is it; but it won't hurt to try it before replacing the drive):  if the drive has reverted to PIO access mode, you may simply be getting consistently bad burns.   If that's the case, the following will resolve it:

Open RegEdit  (Start - Run - RegEdit) and navigate to the following keys:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\ Class\{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}\000x

The last four digits will be 0000, 0001, 0002, 0003, and so on.

Under each key, delete all occurences of the following values:

      MasterIdDataChecksum
      SlaveIdDataChecksum

Then just reboot the computer.

This forces redetection of the transfer mode for all IDE devices ==> if any have been reverted to PIO mode, they will now be reset to DMA transfers.