I purchased a Ricoh MP5240A-SK DVD+R/+RW writer just over a week ago. The drive writes faultlessly to DVD+RW media but completely refuses to write DVD+R. I tried everything I could think of to get a good DVD+R burn but to no avail. In the end I returned the drive to the store (PCWorld) and asked for a replacement, which I got without a problem. Unfortunately the replacement drive is exactly the same - it will not write DVD+R.
My PC is an Asus A7V333 mbd, AMD Athlon 2200+ system with 512Mb of PC2700DDR RAM. My HDD’s are on a PCI RAID controller leaving the onboard IDE free for other drives.
I have tried two different types of media, PCWorld’s own brand (reported by DVDInfoPro as manufacturer ‘OPTODISCOP1’) and Memorex (manufacturer ‘RICOHJPRN00’), so I am convinced it is not a media problem. The PCWorld discs were not cheap at approx GBP1.70 each, and the Memorex cost just under GBP2.00 per disc and even if the PCW discs would not work I cannot see that the Memorex should fail as they are made by Ricoh.
I have tried burning DVD movies, and data. Both fail exactly the same. I have tried three different burning softwares, using system restore between each to ensure that no drivers etc were left on the PC to cause a problem. I have used Nero 6, RecordNowMax 4.5, and the Intervideo software supplied with the writer. The Intervideo software just locks the PC when you go for a burn, whereas Nero and RecordNow both appear to burn faultlessly and report a good burn time after time. But once the disc is burned it is unreadable even in the drive that burned it!
Thinking this might be an IDE issue, I have tried the drive as a secondary slave, and a primary master. I have tried it with a 40 pin and an 80 pin cable. I have tried setting the channel and the drive to UDMA mode 2, MultiWord DMA and even PIO. I have tried shouting profanity at the drive. Same result each time. Coaster. 
Looking at the burned discs in DVDInfoPro shows that they are apparently still blank. Selecting the disc in Windows Explorer produces a ‘Windows cannot read from this disc’ type error. Looking via ISOBuster gives:
The Primary Volume Descriptor (PVD) is unreadable.
Read error at address: 16
Device reported error: 05/21/00
I’m just about at my wits end with this. I have ruined over GBP20.00’s worth of media, am yet to make a single DVD+R, and am extremely disillusioned with this drive. I’m posting this to Ricoh tech support and any DVD forum I can find in the hope that someone may be able to assist me, before I remove this hated spawn-of-the-devil-money-gobbling-evil THING from my PC and boot it as far as I can into the distance. Help. Please. 
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