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Yesterday afternoon, I was planning to burn some DVDs. I now have that capability! whee Here's how it all went down...

Two years ago, my mom bought an LG GSA-4167b Super Multi DVD burner along with some DVD+Recordables, which happened a bit later. We had no knowledge as to how it would burn DVDs.

When it arrived a few days later, I installed it into the Storage Computer, better known as 'The5thPC,' to replace yet another CD-ROM drive. And don't say anything about the fact that it is an LG model. I had no problems with these drives, yet most other brands don't seem to last very long on this PC.

When the DVD+Rs arrived, I became ecstatic, as we now have DVDs in our possession. At this point, I popped in the DVD into the supposed burner and closed the tray. I waited a minute. Then I looked at the stats on 'My Computer' and noticed that both lines, the Free and Capacity stats, state that the drive had zero bytes. I was in shock. After attempting to run the DVD again, the stats stayed the same. At this point, I assumed that it was just a DVD reader with CD burning capabilities (DVD/CD-RW drive) and nothing else, so I left it alone.

Over time, on rare occasions, I messed with it just to see if it would accept the DVD.

And then, on July 29, 2007... out of curiosity, I was searching for info on the drive and learned that it is, in fact, a DVD burner. That was when I started searching for free DVD burning software. I found some pretty good ones. I then installed one of them, inserted the DVD in the burner, closed the tray, and selected the drive as the burner. In return, I received a vague error message:

"The server threw an exception."

This would've been my expression if I get easily frustrated: mad
But this was my actual expression: confused

Of course, trying again would result in the same thing, so I search for 'gsa 4167b troubleshooting,' but misspelled the word as 'troublesooting.' xp Not anything I could find, though... so I also tried 'gsa 4167b support.' I forgot which result brought me the answer, but all I know was to update the firmware.

As I found the latest firmware update, which was revision DL13, I realized that the update itself was a year old. (The revision on the drive at the time was DL11.) I downloaded the update, restarted the computer, started the burning software, and selected the drive as the burner. I expected the program to show that vague error message, but it didn't. I was like, "YES! It succeeded!" But I knew that it would be too good to be true, that is... unless...

I actually burned the DVD.

Hmm... select something larger than the average CD, but is under four gigabytes. I chose the Sonic SatAM Collection for a test run. I waited six minutes and eleven seconds. I ejected the DVD and looked at the burning surface. It wrote to it.

This was my expression: biggrin

I then inserted the DVD again and closed the tray. It recognized it. But I noticed something that I thought was funny: due to being a first-time user to this particular program, I forgot to change the DVD name, so it said, "data." sweatdrop My sis teased me about that, and when I mentioned that I burned the Sonic SatAM episodes on the test DVD, she said, "Boo!" rofl Well, at least it worked.

Copying this to my LiveJournal as a computer moment.