Which is faulty? DVD drive or DVDs?

I've been having problems burning DVDs on both our MacBook Pro (17-inch Core 2 Duo) and our iMac (20-inch Core 2 Duo), using an external DVD burner too, and using various makes of DVDs.

Some burn, some don't, some burn but then fail the verify.

Does anyone know how I can determine whether it is the drives or DVDs that are the problem? Clearly if the DVDs are bad, all drives will fail with them but as different drives fail in different ways with different DVDs, I'm at a lost to how to diagnose this!

Is there, perhaps, any diagnostic software that wll be able to distinguish between a faulty DVD and a faulty drive so I can figure out what I need to replace / fix?

Thanks.

Firstly I would give the drives a clean out, either by blowing air into them, or with a disc based cleaner (though some people hate them, I have found them to be fine).
Secondly, what brand of DVD are you using? Maxell's are notorious for not working on Mac's for example.
Thirdly, what software are you using to burn with?

MBP and iMacs both use slot loading optical drives which seem to have a high failure rate. Just look through the threads. My money would be on the optical drive/s having failed.

Kevriano said:

Firstly I would give the drives a clean out, either by blowing air into them, or with a disc based cleaner (though some people hate them, I have found them to be fine).
Secondly, what brand of DVD are you using? Maxell's are notorious for not working on Mac's for example.
Thirdly, what software are you using to burn with?

Click to expand...

OK. Well, I've used the disk-based cleaner on the MacBook Pro as you suggested. Then I tried a Tesco DVD+R and an Imation DVD+RW with Disk Utility.

The DVD+R reported "Unable to burn ... (The burn failed becaused of a medium write error.)

The DVD-RW reported "Unable to burn ... (The disc drive didn't respond properly and can't recover or retry.)

I've still got to try the same DVDs on other drives / Macs (and other burning software) but that's the results so far...

Just tested it on an external DVD burner (NEC DVD_RW ND-675A) (Same MacBook Pro using Disk Utility using the same DVD-RW; erased it (successfully) first then tried to burn. It burned ok but then error "Verifying the burned data failed.

An attempt to mount the burned disc fails.

Then I would say that your disc burners are shot, but for it to be all 3 is somewhat unlikely/unlucky.
As an experiment, try using a different disc burning utility.
Burn is a good choice, as it's free. Perhaps you have issues within disk utility, or the way you are using it (no offence meant btw). Both brands of disc you are using are fine, never had an issue with them.

Burn - Home

Interesting update: I've just tried using DVD-Rs instead of DVD+R and they worked on both machines! Despite both machines apparently supporting both formats...

Stranger & stranger...