i apologize for the confusion. that should teach me to rush. i am using xp pro with sp2 and 384MB of ram. the notebook has a cd rom (g: in the logs) and the external drive (h: in the logs) is the dvd burner. the lack of ability to successfully burn a dvd data disc is a recent development i only noticed about a month ago. i happened upon this problem when i decided to reformat my hdd which meant i had to back up my data, approximately 30GB worth. i have always used sonic only because it came with the burner and it always got the job done. nero i tried just to see if using another program to burn the dvd's would put an end my new collection of shiny coasters, that is the dvd's that failed. the first dvd i made with nero worked just fine according to nero but the second and third dvd's finished with a burn failed notice just like sonic did. the difference here is that nero offered to save a log of what happened, which i have posted, where as sonic did not. as far as i know i can only assume that whatever the problem is, it is effecting both programs.
