CD writer not burning at all
 

I recently got a new CD writer from Dell as a replacement for my old one. My old one was a piece of crap 4x and they kindly got me a 16x.

Well the first day I got it, it worked fine. The next day however, after restarting my computer, it wouldn't function properly. It would appear to be burning, but the CDs came out blank. This occured using 4 different CD burning programs. I made sure twice that Test Burn and Simulation were checked off.

After calling Dell, they unfortunately told me that it would be best just to reboot the computer, which I have no problem with. The only thing, though, is that I have some information and documents on this computer which I'd like to save but how to do so without my CD burner working?

Also, if anyone knows anything about this following CD writer, please tell me what you can because I can't seem to find anything about it. The CD writer is a HL-DT-ST CD-RW GCE-8160B.

I'd like to add that I usually use Nero 5.5 and what it does is that the buffer will stay at 0% during the entire operation, and also before the burning sequence starts, it will ask me to save a file called Image.nrg, could anyone elaborate on what this is?

Also, I realize that this might not be the best place to ask questions, but I don't know of any place else.

When trying to burn ISOs, I always do Burn Image. It looks like I'm creating images of the images instead of putting the images on CD. Anyone know what I'm doing wrong or could give me step-by-step instructions using Nero 5.5?

Sorry for the noobness, but I seriously don't know what's going on here.

hehe... i think i know what's wrong.

in Nero, choose 'recorder' and then 'choose recorder' .. make sure your burner is selected, not the image recorder !