Why cant I burn Data DVDs with Windows Vista?

Less than a month ago, I bought a brand new Dell Inspiron 1525 Laptop with Windows Vista Home Premium.

It’s been working really great, and I can pretty much do everything I do on my desktop on it, until last night.

I have a lot of files saved on this computer that I would like to transfer to a Data DVD for accessing later. I do a lot of torrents.

So far, I have been able to read and copy data from DVD-R/RW discs made with Windows XP to this computer with no problem.

However, when I select the files I want to copy and hit the “burn” button on Windows Explorer (such as video files from torrents), Vista says it needs to format the disc using Live File System, which I believe is basically UDF 2.01 that can be read by most XP computers.

I use the default options and Vista says it’s formatting the disc. Then, it sits there for about 10 or 12 minutes before it says “Windows is unable to complete format.”

When I select the mastered format, the process seems to work, but the only drawbacks to using that are: you can only write once (which is pretty much on par when you use Nero anyway), but the one that gets me is that you can’t view how much disc space the files are using up until you get ready to burn it, and if they take up too much room, you have to start over. This option seems to work fine, but I never actually burned a disc because I was hesitant. The other problem is that it doesn’t verify the data that’s burned like Nero does.

So, I tried the pre-installed Roxio software, which was a complete disaster. I was actually trying to burn a Data DVD that would hold the VIDEO TS folder from a DVD that I had copied. Everything went fine, but when I went to view the contents of the disc, which I had selected to burn as a DATA DVD, XP recognized it as a DVD movie when in fact, it was supposed to be a Data DVD. So, I put the said disc into my DVD Player and guess what? It was jerky and locked up less than a minute after my DVD player read the disc, which is probably predictable anyway since some DVD players can’t read discs formatted with UDF (at least that’s what I read last night after having the probllem), yet all the other DVD’s I’ve made with Nero using Windows XP have always been able to be read by my DVD player.

So, I have a ton of movies just sitting here in my torrents folder because the burn function in Windows Explorer doesn’t format the discs properly, and I don’t want to use the mastered format because it could be time consuming (trying to keep track of the file size), as well as unreliable since the data isn’t verified.

So, after that, I decided to hook up both computers to the router (to network them) and ended up burning the VIDEO TS folder to a DVD-R disc using Nero on my Windows XP desktop. Guess what? The DVD played fine on my DVD player.

I have enjoyed the mobility and comfort of the Laptop so far, but I’m frustrated because I need to transfer this stuff to discs to save and I can’t do that if the Live File System format doesn’t format the stupid disc.

Are there any other options? On my Windows XP desktop, I’ve always used Nero 6, which isn’t compatible with Vista, but I know Nero 8 is. Can I install Nero 8 and select that as my default program to burn DVD/R/RW discs instead of having to rely on Roxio or the burn option in Windows Explorer?

Please help before I go crazy.

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