Windows 7: DVD disaster

Oh dear. I recently decided to reinstall Win 7 as it`s been about a year and things are starting to go a bit awry. For instance I can no longer open the Start Menu Control Panel without it hanging and having to restart Explorer.



The real problem though is that my DVD drive won`t recognize formatted disks. If I put in a blank up it pops, but nothing else. Device manager says its all ok.

Help please.

You don't "format" Cd's or DVDs. I believe you mean "bootable" DVDs?

If so the first thing you want to check is the "Boot Order" in your BIOS settings. If it is set to boot the hard drive before the optical drive then no, it will not boot the DVD. Set it to boot the CD drive before the hard drive and then try again.

But before you reinstall, did you try and determine the problem?
Some good tips here:
Troubleshooting Steps for Windows 7
And just by asking in this forum.

Hi TVeblen. I kinda do mean formatted. The only way that the DVD (Edrive will appear in explorer is if I try to write an iso in Imgburn and then put in a blank disk.
Imgburn says its preparing or some such for a few secs and then is ready to burn. At this point Explorer will see DVD and up pops the E: option. If I click it it asks if I`d like to format. Not that this helps cause it only works for blanks.
Any other way no E: is shown or available either in a shell or otherwise and I already set BIOS to load from CD/DVD first.

So you are trying to burn an iso to a disk? I assume this is a Windows 7 iso? (and that's how this ties in to installing Windows 7).

Normally you just double click the iso file. Windows 7 will burn an iso natively.