I have recovered some data from a corrupted hard drive, for a friend and I'm trying to get it onto a DVD so that I can take it to work with me tonight.

After transferring his documents, which only took a short time, I decided to put a lot of his Program Files onto the DVD-RW disc. After some sorting out, I was left with 1.79GB and it has been burning this to disc for over 5 hours and still says that it has got more than 30 minutes to go.

The rate of data transfer is as low as 150kbps.

The drive is a Samsung dual-layer DVD-RW SATA and this is possibly the first time I've burnt ANY disc using it in more than two years.

I have Googled this but not found a satisfactory answer and I don't recall seeing it on the Dennis Vista forum at all, which is no longer there from PC Pro anyway.

Any thoughts?

only thing i can think of is it thinks it's burning at the slowest speed possible... what brand disks are you using?

The disc in question is a Verbatim DVD-RW 4x.

The speed is that of a 1x CD iirc, so that would fit the theory, but WHY?

It stated the burn time for the Documents and Settings folder (around 1GB) at about 30 minutes, which was bad enough and I left it to it and it was done when I came back an hour later, but I couldn't believe the time it took for Program Files.

It might burn at a low speed if it doesn't recognise the exact model of disk. Are your drive firmware and burning software completely up to date? I've not had this kind of problem for ages, but then I'm still using a spindle of disks I bought last century!

Also, my old machine simply isn't fast enough to actually feed the drive. I'm guessing this wasn't on the PC in your sig?!

I was just using the default Explorer drag and drop to disc. When I first dragged Documents and Settings over, it had to format first, but that didn't take long and then the burning took say, 45 mins for around 1GB. The 1.7GB took 5 and a half hours in the end.





No. It's my i7 Vista 64 bit system.

I think that this may be the first time I have ever burned data to a DVD. I've used discs to put films on using software that came with my TV card on another (Athlon 2400 based) system. But I have never burnt any other DVDs and I have never used this drive for either CD or DVD burning, despite the fact that it is more than two years old. I tend to back data up to several drives on different machines over my network.

Googling came up with a few different things to check- such as PIO/DMA mode, but these settings don't even appear in the device's properties. I am not on that machine at the moment and I've got lots of other things to do so I'll have a quick check of settings later and see if there is anything obvious.

Thanks, both.

I'd try using some burning software. I have no experience of the Vista built-in DVD writing; in fact I'd not realised it supported it!

http://cdburnerxp.se/ says it works on Vista. I think it's pretty good.