Hello, and thanks to those experts who give advice on here.

I have a Dell Dimension 4400 which a couple years ago I added an internal DVD RW drive, the Sony dw-d26a. It suddenly stopped the ability to write or recognize blank discs. This occurred after I attached a new USB 2.0 external hard drive and had to update the BIOS from dell's website. (at first, I went through several freeze ups and manual shut downs before I got the External hard drive problem fixed). Now, when I put a blank DVD(-R or +RW) in, the icon in My Computer strangely changes to "CD-ROM" and when I double click it it says, "please insert disc". It plays DVDs fine. I contacted Sony, and they say it's a third party so they can't help, and newegg.com says it's out of warranty so they can't help either.

I downloaded the "drivecheck.exe" from sony and ran it and it passed everything but failed the write test (gave no other info other than a phone number to call, where they told me they couldn't help).

I had a couple viruses on my computer but BitDefender removed them. Spybot S&D showed no problems. Problem still persists... any ideas? As far as I can tell I have the latest drivers (JYS3).

Oh, and the sony drivecheck program gives this error message: "edwBeginWriteDisc returned the following error: ASPI - 80 (Invalid SRB_Cmd)"