Can't read DVD that I burned on another computer

[LBrandt]

Hello,
This is my first post on this forum, and it will probably appear to be a dumb one, but here goes. I am running Windows XP Home, and I have successfully burned and read many DVD+R disks on my computer. I know that the DVD drive and laser are working properly, because I just checked a DVD+R that I burned several months ago, and it reads fine.
Yesterday, on a friend's computer (a Dell) also running Windows XP Home, I burned a DVD+R disk. After burning it, it worked fine on my friend's computer, but when I try to read it on my PC, it won't work. The files that I burned on it are JPeg images, and they appear perfectly on his machine, but they will not read on my machine. When I load it on my machine, it acts as if there are no bytes on the disk.
The only difference is that the software used to burn the DVD on his machine is different from the software that I use on my machine to burn DVDs.
What's going on, and is there anything that I can do to read the DVD on my machine?
Thanks,
Louis

 

[Kage]

Its possible that you didn't finalise the disk (That shouldn't be a problem for a PC though), or, the files were put onto the memory in the program (for example if he used the standard Windows burner), but were never actually burned.

 

[LBrandt]

Kage,
Maybe you're right, but I still don't understand. When I went to my friend's house to burn the DVD, I couldn't find the actual option in his burner software that looked like the right one to use, so instead, I just dragged and dropped the files onto his DVD drive folder. But when I took the DVD back to his computer today, it still read the images fine (and his computer had been rebooted in the meantime). So what I can't understand is, even if I didn't burn them properly, why will they show up on his machine and not mine?

 

[Kage]

Ah, they'll still be in the memory of his computer, for that drive, so you didn't actually burn the files onto the disk.

There is an option to do so on the left though. It should say "Burn These Files To Disk"

You would have found that if you took the disk out, the files would have still been there on the disk drive in My Computer.

 

[LBrandt]

Kage,
You were absolutely right! Just now, I went back to his house, and this time, I correctly found the appropriate options to actually burn the DVD. It now works fine on my machine. One thing though, I had already considered the idea that, even though we had previously been able to view the images on his machine, the images were just in his DVD drive's memory buffer. But we turned off and rebooted his machine, and the images were still there when we reinserted the DVD. You are saying that the images would have been placed onto the "C" drive in "My documents", and I didn't take that into consideration. In any case, I burned the data correctly this time.

 

[Kage]

Glad it worked
Yeah, they wouldn't have been stored in the buffer, but somewhere in the computers hard drive, as shortcuts, ready to be burned.