I tried searching and cheking the FAQs and came across nothing that helped. If this has been addressed elsewhere, I apologize.

I have an NEC ND-3540A DVD+/-R drive on my Gateway 8310M that doesn't behave itself. It won't recognize blank cds at all and when I INSERT a dvd for burning, the label in windows explorer changes to "CD Drive". I can't burn from windows explorer or Nero Express. The only program that will burn anything at all is Nero Back-It-Up and that's BUGGY, too.

I have tried uninstalling the drive and rebooting and uninstalling the Secondary IDE Channel and rebooting to no avail. All the drives are in "DMA if available", not PIO mode. I also tried updating the driver, but I appear to have the most recent driver available. Also, troubleshooting the drive reveals no problems. On the recommendation of a few friends who have had a lot of problems with it, I have also uninstalled all Nero programs and still no change.

Unfortunately, I didn't have cause to discover this problem while it was still under warranty. But I've been needing to burn more discs lately, so any help is appreciated. Keeping my fingers crossed

In the interest of full disclosure, I have a standard DVD drive on here, too, that doesn't work at all. But if I can get the combo drive (super drive?) working, I don't really care about the other one.

Finally, here is all the other info I can think of for my machine, whether you need it or not.

Gateway 8310M
Windows XP, Media center Edition, Version 2002, Service Pack 2
Pentium 4 3.00GHz
512MB RAM
250GB HD



Thanks. Sorry for the long post.
Hmmm you've got two drives that doesn't work? On the same IDE channel i presume?
Could you try the BURNER in another computer?How many different brands of blank media have you tried ? ?Deerpark: I think they're both on the same (Secondary) IDE Channel, but to be honest, I'm pretty quickly GETTING over my head here, so I don't know for sure. And unfortunately, I have no other pc to check the drive on.

patio: I have only tried TDK CD-R and DVD-R, but I was able to record on them occasionally using Nero Back-It-Up, so it doesn't seem like that's the problem, does it?Some burners are picky about the media...borrow one from each of your friends til you find a brand that works...