I just tried to burn onto a cdrw for the first time and my drive is saying there is no disk in the drive. I've burned plenty of cdr's with no problem, but i cant get it to burn to rw's.

Is this common?
Can i fix it?

on winxp with amd xp1700

Occasionally you'll get a bad disc or find that your burner just doesn't like some brands of discs. Try a different brand of CDRW & see if that fixes it.

The cyberdrive cdrw that came with it showed as no media, and the only other one i tried was an office depot cdrw.

If you've tried a couple of CDRW and it still doesn't work then:
If it's a new drive under warranty take it back
If it's an older drive and you've used it alot it may be dirty , you could try cleaning it. http://www.deinmeister.de/cdrep_e.htm