Yes, InCD will, as far as I can tell, solve the problem, but it causes more problems than it solves. it's a really dire piece of software.

500GB of DVD-RAM would certainly not be cheap, but a) I don't need anything like that amount of storage for important backups, 40-50GB is more like it, and b) DVD-RAM is probably the most reliable form of storage currently on the market and affordable.

The disks are good for 30+ years of data retention, and 100K+ write/erase cycles. This isn't just marketing balls, either. A friend of mine has used DVD-RAM for multiple daily backups at work for the last 10 years, with the same set of disks, which still work perfectly! That's more than can be said of the hard drives used in the computers that have been backed up. When they started, of course the drives were £3000 each, plus media at nearly £100 a disk...

I have finally found a method of making it work. It was simply:

Get a modified drive flasher program
Get a copy of the firmware for the Liteon drive the Sony one is based on.
Reflash the drive with this firmware
Download the panasonic DVD-RAM drivers
Modify the DVDRAM.INF file with the correct data for the now Liteon drive
Install the drivers
Reboot
Uninstall them again because something went wrong
Reboot
Reinstall them once more
Reboot
Wait for all the new hardware to be found
Reboot
Job done!

Easy. Whoever said that windows was difficult to work with

Then, of course, I discovered that the Liteon/Sony drive doesn't like Maxell media. Guess what I had? Pretty much all of the DVD-RAM media available easily is preformatted as UDF2.0, which is for video/audio in standalone DVD recorders and camcorders. It doesn't work correctly with data files in a PC. So you have to reformat the disks as either FAT32 (2GB file limit) or UDF1.5. For some reason the Maxell disks won't successfully format as anything but UDF2.0. No idea why.

So I went out and bought a 10-pack of panasonic disks, which are pretty cheap at £18 the pack. I have found that about 7 of them would happily reformat as UDF1.5 with no problems. The rest, oddly, would only work if I reformatted as FAT32 first, then UDF1.5, or they gave an error right at the end of the 40-minute process. Again, no idea why.

Once they're formatted, they seem to work perfectly. I'm going to completely fill a couple of them and run some data integrity tests, because it's still possible that there is a hardware/firmware/driver problem that's causing this odd behaviour, but from what I've learned it's more likely to just be windows being awkward about reliably running the formatting program. It seems to be a little buggy. At one point it crashed for no obvious reason, and the mouse pointer on the middle monitor of my 3-head machine vanished! It was there on the other two, just not the middle one

As I type this I have realised that the disk formatting seems to die most often if I'm using the machine while it's doing the format. When I leave it alone it usually works, if I'm browsing the web or something like that it fails about 60% of the time. Multitasking? I've heard of that somewhere, I wonder where?

Did I mention I really hate computers? Or maybe it's just ones with an OS...

pca