Recovery Disc Creation says "the disc you inserted is not blank" but it is blank

[hshubin]

Windows Vista Home Premium, SP2. HP G60 Notebook.

I'm (finally) creating recovery disks. When I insert a DVD-RW disk, I get an error message: "The disc you inserted is not blank". But it is blank. I tried using formatted and unformatted disks, but no luck. What next? I don't want to try CDs, because it'll take 17 of them (vs. 3 DVDs).

thanks

[Paul_Tikkanen · Accepted solution]

Hi:

You might want to try a DVD-R or DVD+R vice a DVD-RW.

Paul

[Dragon-Fur]

Congrats on making those Recovery discs!

In my experience, and I've made lots and lots of these sets -

Paul is absolutely right. 

Always use DVD-R

The RW won't work.  I won't even type the word, lest someone get the wrong idea.  Smiling.

Here's a spooky afterword:

EVEN with your own Recovery Discs,

Order the Factory set from HP.

Just in Case the Recovery set you make has a flaw... a tiny, little, flaw.  I've only had it happen once, but it was enough.

Good Luck!

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[Paul_Tikkanen]

I will also add that an almost fool proof way of reinstalling the operating system, is to use a plain vanilla operating system installation disk, if you can live without all of the bundled programs that come with your PC.

Recovery disks don't always work for one reason or another--even the ones you get directly from HP.

You can download the essential stuff you need from your notebook's support and driver page.

Don't have a plain vanilla installation disk, you say?

If you can read your product key you can make your own by following the info at the link below.

Windows Vista:

http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/software-os/w/microsoft_os/3317.2-3-microsoft-windows-vi...

[Dragon-Fur]

Paul,

I love this idea, especially for Vista. 

I've not had Vista on anything for awhile.. it is ..uhm, bloatware in it's finest form with all the extras.  But, I am also one of the few people on the planet that actually liked Vista.  Yes.

I've never had too many issues with the Recovery discs...but I don't trust a single source of anything.  I keep redundant backups (methods, servers, NAS, redundant methods of recovery, I have an extra retail copy of Windows 7 (legal, purchased)... I am Old IT - It it hard to find anything more paranoid than Old IT.  Smiling.

Thanks!

[hshubin]

Thanks everyone. I'll go out and get the other DVD disks tonight.

[Paul_Tikkanen]

You're both very welcome.

Hi:

Dragon-Fur:

You can also make your own W7 disks too.

http://www.mydigitallife.info/official-windows-7-sp1-iso-from-digital-river/

I also don't mind Vista. The only thing I don't like about it is the disk defragmenter takes forever to run on any installation I have ever done.

So, I use Auslogics disk defrag on vista machines.

Vista runs very nicely if you do some tweaking to some settings, tasks, services and the registry, and max out the memory to whatever the PC can be maxed out to.

I have done most of these tweaks except turning off indexing.

http://www.winvistaclub.com/t1.html

The other thing I did was to edit the superfetch service registry to only optimize start up files rather than the whole file system.

http://www.pcauthorities.com/windows-vista/control-superfetch-in-windows-vista/

It is normally the superfetch thing that causes the hard drive to constantly thrash. Most folks disable it entirely in the services menu.

Paul

[Dragon-Fur]

Hey Paul,

I actually have the Windows 7 downloads / info because I've been on it so long and I hate unturned stones.  Smiling.

Hmm.. Took a look at those links.  I'd done some of these... I was an early adopter of Vista and did a lot of experimenting.  Vista was so fat and my system was so skinny - it was a challenge to say the least.  Smiling.

I didn't like the Defrag either... I really do think the Vista code for it is flawed.  I cannot remember what I used in place of it.

Superfetch is one of those things that should have been thought through better before it was implemented without switches for the common user. 

Between Vista users, and in secret without witnesses, I'd even go so far to say that I liked Vista   I've seen many OSs over the long years; Vista was just the beginning of something that looked like it would be interesting.  I wonder how many folks realize how much of Vista is still in Windows 7? 

Bet hshubin didn't think to get all this wonderful Vista info from one little question, eh?  

Thanks, again!

[Paul_Tikkanen]

To me, Windows 7 is Vista that works.