External CD burner troubles
 

I am having trouble consistently burning cds with my new external cd burner. Its a mitsubishi diamond data CDRW. I have burnt one cd through windows media player but it takes a long time and I have difficulty burning anything else except accidently burning the nero cd when I was first tinkling around :) I have Nero ver 5.5 and when I use the wizard it keeps burning image files instead of burning straight to the cd. When I try and burn the image file, it tries to create another image file. I have tried to delete nero, but it fails to delete. I have also tried cdrwin5, but it has buffer errors and always fails to finish writing to the cd, in the process I am running out of cds like they are going out of style. Can anyone help? The computer I have is an Acer notebook:

Celeron 1gig
256mb ram
10gig hdd
win xp home

Thanks Pretzal

Bad luck! Similar story to mine although my external CD Writer is Freecom.

First good thing I did was to switch from Roxio to Nero - which you already have.

Next, always check the bottom right hand corner of the Nero window to see that Nero has found your CD Drive. If it hasn't, no point in trying to write a disk; all you will get is an image file.

Check your hardware manager to see if the CD Drive is working properly. (In Windows 2000 this is: Right Click "My Computer"/Properties/Hardware Tab/Device Manager). If it's not you may be able to update the driver from the Mitsubishi CD.

Finally, what did it for me was going to Control Panel/Add Remove Hardware and deleting the multiple copies of the CD Drive that had somehow been loaded. First, of course, start up the Notebook with the CD Drive disconnected.

Then, with all mention of the External CD Writer removed, do your cold boot with the CD Writer connected and let Plug 'n Play do its stuff.

Nero and WMP may be fighting over the CD Writer. When I installed WMP, I rejected the option to burn CDs and I never use it for that purpose. Nero works perfectly first time every time.