Had the same problem on an HP Pavilion that is only two years old. Was using Memorex CD-RW that has speed of 1X to 4X. When it was in, Windows Media Player wouldn't recognize the CD in the drive. In fact, on several occasions, the CD light stayed on for a long time, even almost an hour. Finally had to do a hard shutdown. Things had been working fine a few months ago, then had to use the System Recovery feature on the hard drive to format, due to virus problems, etc. She didn't try to record CDs for awhile after the reformat. She didn't put the downloaded music files back on, as we feared that there might have been viruses in them. Anyhow, last month (August 2004) she did the automatic update to Service Pack 2 for Windows XP. Afterwards, using the same CDs, we experienced the above-mentioned problems. Very frustrating! We didn't know whom to cuss at! Anyhow, another neighbor, Richard, came over and put his two cents in. The error we had been seeing said that we may need to change the record speed or check the CD for scratches. We lowered the speed all the way down to 2X. Put in two other new CDs from the same pack. Nothing worked. Richard looked at the CD and noticed that it has a smoky gray colored back and said that he also had lots of problems with CDs that had that color of back. We went to Wal-Mart a little while ago and all CDRWs were Memorex. We saw a pack of 30 Color CD-R from Maxell that said the speed was "up to" 48X. Not knowing the record speed of this CD-RW drive (and we STILL don't, after searching the hard drive for information). Anyhow there was an 800 phone number on the package, 800-377-5887 and we called. It was around 2 AM our time, but we found the number was 24/7. Very nice! The tech support guy explained things a bit and we decided to just go ahead and buy these to see. Well, they are SUPERB! Media Player recognized them just fine. The recording took only about 17 minutes. She said that using the Memorex CD-RW would take 45 minutes for a comparison. So we'd definitely advise going with these Maxell CDs. The website is www.maxell-data.com.
Neighbors Isabella and Michelle in Kansas City, MO.
Isabella, October 2004