Why did my R52 and T60 suddenly fail to burn DVDs?

[mgo]

Recently, I tried to burn an ISO to a DVD using my R52, and it failed. I tried another disk on my T60, using its own burner and that failed, too. I pulled out the Windows 7 hard drive and slipped in a Vista drive, and the R52 failed to burn on that OS too. I also tried another, different ISO, and that failed as well.

What's puzzling is, these are DVDs that have worked fine up till now. Both machines have always burned ISOs up till this week. So, two machines, two operating systems, and two different DVD drives-all failed to burn the ISO.

Finally, I got a successful burn using a newer HP laptop, and its own DVD burner.

I'm mystified that DVD burning would suddenly fail on two different machines & two different operating systems using two different DVD drives. Any ideas, folks?

I finally ended up buying a Pioneer USB DVD drive, and it successfully burned the original failed ISO on the same R52, using Windows 7.

Since all my machines keep a second hard drive in the Ultra Bay slot, having an external USB drive is a plus for me. So investing 70 bucks was worth it. But why the heck did DVD burning suddenly fail? I even bought some new blanks, and got the same results.

The messages said something about "media speed does not match the hardware".

Ideas welcome.

[RealBlackStuff]

You say you use an external burner.
I interpret this as you using the same (old) burner on both R52 and T60, and both burns fail.
The obvious answer would be: the (old) burner failed, not the OS or the laptop...

[mgo]

You say you use an external burner.
I interpret this as you using the same (old) burner on both R52 and T60, and both burns fail.
The obvious answer would be: the (old) burner failed, not the OS or the laptop...

I did a re-edit on my original post, to try and make it more clear. Thanks.

[RealBlackStuff]

Try a different DVD brand and maybe DVD-R instead of DVD+R (or vice versa).
I find the DVD-R much better than +R but YMMV.