Why won't my DVD RW drive (D) read blank discs?

I am suddenly having this same issue.
My older SATA optical drive died and I replaced it with a new one a SATA. It worked just fine for a while and today I wanted to write to it and couldn't.
It can read CDs and DVDs just fine but when I put a CD or DVD in the drive it doesn't recognize them.
I highlight the files and right click them and go to Send To in the drop down list and the DVD is not listed.
I had a USB floppy drive plugged in and have been using a bluetooth broadcaster for a pair of Jabra headphones.
I'm going to unplug them and do a cold boot and see if that changes anything.

bigmck said:

Have you tried using Windows Media Player. If anything should work, it should. Just drag your files to the player and burn. You have to wait a few seconds until Media Player recognizes the files before burning. Let us know what problems you have.

I'll try that.

I just tried to reinstall the drivers for my ASUS DVD/ CD player.

I logged as Admin and went to Device manager and selected the bad actor under DVD/CD-ROM Drives and uninstalled it and rebooted.
Oddly when I was looking at it under device manager the Windows system was telling me that the device was operating correctly.

On reboot the system found it and installed the drivers.

It sees the DVD drive when I go to START COMPUTER and select Computer but when I install a blank CD and scan it I get the same error message and when I try to Send To that drive the drive does no show up in the drop down list

So no change from before.

I Downloaded Mr Fix It from microsoft and will see if that does any good.

-----EDIT-----

WELL NOW THIS IS EMBARRASSING~!!!!!

I just spent a couple hours trying to fix a problem that didn't exist.

My DVD/CD is a ROM device. It was never capable of burning.

GEEBUS~!!! Some people are SooOOooOOooOOooOOo dumb.
I gotta stop being one of them.

bigmck said:

Are you sure? I didn't think they made DVD ROM anymore? Is yours really old?

Yipper skipper
ASUS Black 18X DVD-ROM 48X CD-ROM SATA DVD-ROM Drive Model DVD-E818AAT (DVD-E818AAT/BLK/B/GE) - CD / DVD Drives - Newegg.com

bigmck said:

I am shocked. Why would anyone buy a ROM when you can get a burner for the same price?
dvd burner - Newegg.com

Oh don't be shocked. I am frequently amazed at my capacity to not look carefully at things when in a hurry. And I was in a hurry when I bought that.

As I recall, I had searched out reviews on CD/DVD players and never gave a moment's consideration that they might not also be writers.

Well to the credit of the fine folks at ASUS I wrote them this morning asking for a link to the firmware and they sent it to me. Mind you I described my problem and the tech guy was kind enough not to tell me what a dope I was.