Ok, my burner has never had a problem recognizing, reading from, burning to etc. etc. cd-rw discs. Just recently though the drive stopped recognizing them. I would place a cd-rw disc (blank or with info on it) into the tray and close it but the burner would not spinup with the disc in there. I usually use Nero burning Rom to burn cds and there is an option in Nero to check the "media info" but Nero will report that there is no disc in the drive. Trying to actually burn onto the cd will just cause the cd tray to open and tell me to insert a disc when there is already a cd-rw disc in the tray. The burner has no problem with any other type of cd but cd-rw's. I just ran a full system scan with norton's latest virus definitions in safe mode and it didn't find any viruses

-The cd-rw's are 1x-4x memorex
-the drive is a Philips CDRW4012P
-there are no problems listed in the device manager
-I tried uninstalling the IDE channels and also uninstalling and reinstalling the drive

I'm not a computer noob so I have probably thought of most or all obvious solutions.

Memorex CD-RW discs do not have the best reputation. Have you tried another brand, and if so, do you get the same results?

well I have always used memorex cd-rw's in the past and they have always worked. The burner is probably no more than 8 maybe 10 months old and I've burned maybe 75 cd's both cd-r and cd-rw since I got it. My guess is that its not a disc problem because of the fact that they have always worked in the past and the cd is almost scratch free with only a couple extremely minor scratches. It's gotta be some setting somewhere that needs changing.

I just used the cd-rom cleaner to clean the burner and then tried inserting a cd-rw again. First try after the cleaning yielded the same results that I've always been getting, but then I tried putting the cdrw in the tray again and the burner finally recognized it. Maybe it does have to do with the burner not liking the memorex cd-rw's

Strange thing though is that my regular cd-rom drive recognizes cd-rw discs all the time with no problem.

Oh and I didn't try using the cleaner before because I couldn't find it then.