Member Avatar for CLEARICE01

my system is a pentium4.1400.with winxp home a 40gig hd with 37.3 on the main partition and 7 mb on the rest.i just got powerquest driveimage 7.0 and after formating the cd-rw i try to burn the image of my hd to the cd-rw but i get a popup saying that the media is not ready make shure the media is in the drive and is formated and writable.eny help would be appreciated...

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Brief recap: reported DriveImage 7.0 failing with a "media not ready" popup when trying to write to a CD‑RW. saw the same and could burn to a CD. pointed at background software as a possible factor. The error most often comes from how the recorder and Windows present a rewritable disc (packet‑writing, unfinalized UDF sessions, or driver/firmware mismatches), or from workflow issues when the image is larger than the media. The following checks and steps are practical, low‑risk, and have helped people with similar setups.

Quick checklist and workflow

  • Confirm image size first. A full partition image can be many gigabytes; create the image to a hard drive or network share if possible, then burn the resulting files to discs in a separate step. If you must span to CDs, use the image software option to split into 650/700MB segments (if available).

  • Disable packet‑writing/virtual‑CD drivers before burning (examples: InCD, DirectCD). Packet drivers make the disc look like a normal folder to Windows, but many imaging programs need raw access and will fail with "media not ready."

  • Do a clean boot while creating/burning the image: run msconfig, hide Microsoft services, disable non‑Microsoft services and startup items, reboot, perform the image/burn, then restore settings.

  • Update the CD‑RW drive firmware and the recorder driver. Use a lower burn speed and make sure the session is finalized when the burn finishes.

  • If long‑term reliability matters, use stable storage (write‑once media, DVD, or an external USB drive) and verify every backup by mounting or performing a test restore.

If these steps don’t help, include the exact error text, whether packet‑writing software is installed, and whether the image was created to disk first; that narrows diagnostics further.

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Member Avatar for terisden

This is so scarey, I wished I had seen your thread three days ago. I have the same dang problem! And I bought it with the understanding that I could copy it to my cd-rw's. Did you get any anwers anywhere else? I can backup on a cdr

Member Avatar for Catweazle

Use a CDR!

Drive imaging software doesn't work very well with CD-RW media, from the reports I've seen.

And before you make a drive image in any case, it would be a sensible move to turn off background running programs such as AntiVirus, 'Disk-on-Demand' and other such stuff that scans as you work. It just makes more sense not to have them running.

It's not hard to turn them back on after you restore the drive image, is it?

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