My Acer F5P4 computer has an un-branded CD/DVD reader/writer, shows up as an HL-DT-ST-DVDRRW GWA-4164B in the "my computer" info, and the manufacturer is shown as "Standard CD ROM drives". It uses the driver from Windows XP Pro, "\system 32\DRIVERS|cdrom.sys"and does not have it's own driver.
It will read DVD's and CD's burnt on my other computer, but when asked to write to CD, it can't find the blank, either for CD, or DVD. ACER tells me it is a software problem, and I should reload Windows. This seems to be a major drama, for just a driver problem, and just uninstalling the driver and re-installing it from Windows doesn't work. Any ideas

To ensure that the drive itself is fine, try using the Windows built in CD recording s/w to burn a disc. Insert a blank CD in the drive and open a My Documents window. Right click on any file, point to "Send To" and select "CD-RW drive". Once you do that, you'll see a popup at the bottom right of the screen that says "You have files waiting to be written to CD". Click that baloon and in the wizard that pops up, follow the on screen prompts. If while doing this you receive an error, reply to this thread with the exacts error message and we'll go from there. If this process is successful, the drive is fine and the issue could be with the recording software (Nero, Roxio, Sonic etc).

The windows burning software (wizard) is the only burning software provided. It is this wizard which cannot find the blank disc

Hi, I am having exactly the same problem with an Acer aspire 1640z...!

Either the blank disk (or dvd) spins up after insertion and does not stop spinning OR it stops spinning after a few mins and then wont eject (via explorer or button press) leaving me with no choice but to reboot!... this is only with blank cds and dvds !!! I am running xp aswell.

nero wont work, nti wont work, and i tried the recomended solution written above but just get an error message saying the cd/dvd is not blank please insert a blank disk....they are blank (brand new off the shelf, just unwrapped type!) tried 700mb cds and dvd+r
any ideas here people? please help as Acer do seem to have the fob off approach with me aswell!

:/
thanx 4 ur time folks

You should carefully follow the steps of determining whether the Disc burner is okay. Some devices have poor performance. Good luck!

Hi,
Have you changed the brand or interchanged the burner with another burner of same brand? This is a great way to locate hardware fault. You can easily detect whether your disc burner is okay. Thanks!

The first solution which says windows built in testing system is a good choice. By this way, you know that whether the fault is hardware of software related. Second way is reboot the system. Sometimes, reboot helps a lot. Third way is to change the drive with another brand or same brand of different one. After these steps, your disc burner problem may not exist.

Go to Device Manager, select the DVD/CD Drive, click Properties, and select the appropriate region for your player - usually problems like this are down to the wrong region being selected or indeed no region atall