Help - DVD burner coasters at same spot randomly

Excellent site, lots of excellent information here - you guys rock

I hope someone might be able to help with a problem I have not been able to solve. I recently purchased an NEC 3540A, which coastered about 20% of my TDK DVD-R media. After I tried several things (detailed below), I sent the drive back and bought a Lite-On 1693S. The Lite-On has the EXACT same problem.

After creating so many coasters, I have noticed a few things:

• It is always a media write error
• It occurs at random (i.e. every other burn, or after 4 or 5 successful burns)
• It is always at roughly 50% in the burn process and all the coasters look identical upon inspection

I have tried numerous things:

• Burning with the latest version of Nero with all updates
• Burning with the latest version of Roxio with all updates
• Moving the DVD-burner to primary slave and secondary master - have not tried secondary slave yet
• Updated the BIOS to the latest BIOS firmware
• Backed off the BIOS firmware to the last production release
• Replaced both hard drives
• Replaced the RAM in the system
• Wiped all hard drives and reinstalled Windows XP Pro
• Disabled Norton AV during burns
• Burning at slower speeds

I have thought about trying other media but a few co-workers have the same drives and are using the same batch of TDK media without problems. Also, since the media coasters the same every time, I think it is some other problem.

I am going to try moving the configuration around to the boot HD as primary IDE master, CD-ROM as primary IDE slave, 2nd HD as secondary IDE master, and DVD-RW as secondary IDE slave and see if that makes a difference.

If anyone has any other ideas, I welcome your suggestions.

My system is running on an ASUS A7V266-C, 512 MB RAM, Athlon 1.4 GHz processor,

INCD/DLA? Up your buffers(2 in there) in Nero! Use only one burn program at a time!

Decrease you burn speed in Nero to 8X!

You really really should try different media! Problems with the media is by far the most likely explanation for your problem, and it makes no sense to ignore that as explanation just because others don't have problems with the same media type.

There can easily be quality differences between media even in the same spindle!

So try burning on different media before you start trying to align your pc tower towards Mekka, painting your drive pink, or moving to a different country.

Yesssssssssss.

Try the drive in another computer.