CD burner stopped working

[Martini]

I have a 6 year old Gateway computer and recently when trying to burn something to a disc, I get the message "There is no disc in the drive. Please insert a writable CD into the drive E :\."

I tried using several different blank discs. I'm assuming the burner is just plain broken, but I was wondering if someone could help me determine that for sure before I bought a new one. Thanks.

 

[The_Other_One]

I'm quite sure disks like Linux live disks and such allow you to burn disks. If you have one you could boot to, maybe you could try a test burn under another OS. That should tell you if it's software or hardware.

Or if the computer's a desktop and there's another around, maybe you could try the burner in another machine.

 

[Martini]

I tried it with Linux also. Didn't work.

Since I have an older computer with those flay gray cables, will newer burners not work with my pc?

 

[The_Other_One]

Of course! A good number of burners use those flat gray cables(or more commonly called IDE or PATA )

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827106062

Though if I were you, I'd go ahead and look into a DVD burner or even a DVD-ROM/CD-RW. They aren't that much more and you get much more functionality.

 

[Martini]

Thanks for the info.

I'm assuming the one below will work just fine?

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1043377&CatId=477

 

[The_Other_One]

Yup, it should.