Windows 7: burning data blu-ray, all I get is coasters!

So I have about 120GB of personal pictures that I'm working on making a backup by burning to Blu-Ray single layers (23.4GB each formatted) with my LG Blu-Ray burner (model WH10LS30K). I was hoping to burn them directly using Seven's built-in optical burning capabilities. Problem is, I only get about 1 good disc for every 5 bad ones!!! I'm getting really sick of burning $1 coasters...

I have tried burning both as a "live disc" and "all at once," but neither works reliably... When I burn it all at once, the entire disc seems to burn but then windows comes up with a window saying the disc did not burn successfully, and the disc is DOA (once in great while it will successfully burn, but I haven't had a good one in about 7 tries now). If I try the live disc route, it will burn around 6-8 GB and then come up with an error saying the file system has changed and it cannot burn the file. Once this error happens, the disc will not accept any new files but the ones that got on there are good. Tried changing burn speed between 1x and 8x, no affect (the drive is capable of 10x, but the BD-R discs are only 4x).

As far as I can tell there are no firmware upgrades for the LG WH10LS30K, and the only driver apparently available is the Windows one that auto-installed when I got the drive.

HELP

BTW I have 3 good discs that successfully burned using the "burn all at once" method where you drag/drop files to the drive and Windows waits saying you have files ready to be burned, and then I put in a disc and tell it to burn the files all at once. As far as I can tell there isn't anything I did differently than before, I've even tried burning the EXACT same files again.

I was under the impression that Windows didn't natively support Blu-Ray. At work we use add-on programs to get this functionality.

From this link ( Windows 7 Media player will not play back BluRay disc's ) it appears that you must have commercial codecs to support it (and that's why it's not included in Windows 7). (reminiscent of the problems with DVD burning in older Windows OS's)

Most Blu-Ray players come with this software - did yours? What happens when you try to burn a Blu-Ray disk with that program?

You're right that Windows 7 doesn't support Blu-Ray movie playback, but it seems to at least know that a formatted BD-R has ~23GB free space, and it will let me drag & drop 23GB of stuff before burning a BD-R... it just errors out and gives me coasters left and right.

The drive didn't come with commercial software because it's an OEM model. I use PowerDVD for Blu-Ray playback, maybe I'll have to get NERO for burning discs?

I just had an issue 2 weeks ago with a customer complaining that they couldn't burn DVD's on their old XP system. I installed Cyberlink Power2Go and they were happy.

I have seen this freeware program recommended, but haven't tried it myself: The Official ImgBurn Website

The weird thing is, Windows 7 appears to support Blu-Ray burning natively because it can properly format the BD-R, and I have 3 discs I have successfully burned with over 20GB of data on them. I'm getting the feeling the native support is buggy and doesn't have good buffering though...

USASMA is giving some great advise; ImgBurn is the best Blu-ray burning program period.

I have reviewed several BD Burners for LG, ASUS, and Sony and ImgBurn is my best friend over any included application from CyberLink which is what all the manufacturers seem to bundle with their drives.

Here are some nice guides on using ImgBurn you might care to look over.

ImgBurn Guides

ImgBurn is working great! Don't know Windows' problem is, but ImgBurn is burning at 6x no problem with verified good discs.

Thanks!

I was having a similar problem with regular DVD's using Windows built in burner. I switched to CDBurnerXP and no more problems. I guess Windows is not up to the task.

Jim