Someone suggested:
See here:
CD-R drive or CD-RW drive is not recognized as a recordable device
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/316529/
If that doesn't work, maybe you should look into downloading new
drivers or firmware for your drive.
Well, my previous suggestion about the recording tab didn't work for
you, but by a strange coincidence I found another chance for you that
can explain why you might not be able to record to your drive.
I hope that all the insults you got didn't get in the way of getting
work done.
316529 tells you that maybe the BIOS didn't recognize that you have
a recordable drive. I just spent the last few hours fighting EXACTLY
this problem with a Dell. External USB CDR/CDRW, worked find on other
machines every time but the Dell refused to recognize it. So I found
316529 on my own, edited the registry, that got me the Record tab in
My Computer but the drive still wouldn't write and gave errors, BUT
not a clue about what the problem REALLY was.
So I started digging. 316529 gave no hints. But I finally found that
when I checked Run Msconfig that the IMAPI CD Burning Com Service had
been turned off on that machine. I turned that on, rebooted the
machine, the Dell recognized this was a CDR/CDRW, the recordable tab
appeared and the drive happily made a backup CD for me. 324129
mentions IMAPI service and turning it on.
Maybe someone who talks to the people who maintain the knowledgebase
might think whether IMAPI being turned off might be another reason
that a CDR or CDRW would not be recognized as writeable, and if so
mention IMAPI in 316529, or at least point to it as an item to check.
(Two decades ago I spent a day trying to convince Microsoft Engineers
that "greyed" items in menus should do something when you clicked on
them, they should explain why you couldn't do what would happen when
the item wasn't grey, and maybe even explain what you needed to do to
get the thing to not be grey. They literally could not understand
that this was the biggest opportunity for context-sensitive-help that
they ever had. In fact they wanted to go the opposite direction, they
said they wanted greyed items to actually vanish completely in their
next version. Think how much wasted time and aggravation could be
saved if you saw the tab was greyed, clicked on it anyway and it said
"Aha, I understand that you really want to do recording but I see that
the IMAPI service has been turned off and having that turned on is
needed before you can do recording, so go click there to turn it on
and then come back here and do your recording.")
Donald Norman has written several books saying that things just don't
have to be this difficult to figure out how to use. Read them.
Thank you
