Sorry... here, I'll explain somewhat.
CD-Rs are manufactured with two layers, recording layer and a die layer- the two colors are expressed as reflective layer-dye layer.
the recording layer I think is more important to wether a device will recognize it- for example, some recordables are "yellow" on the bottom, a shiny gold, if you will. Others are pure silvery, and others are bluish... (I hope you know what I mean...)
As an example of the "Dye layer"- take a Playstation 1 disc, with the black underside. It's really just the die layer being coloured. It is transparent to the disc laser.
Anyway- some drives have difficulty with particular colour combinations.
I originally thought that my Drive had died... but it could still play audio CDs and factory CDs... I was trying all sorts of things to fix it... then I popped in an old backup CD-R (with Blue reflective layer), and it read just fine. Unfortunately I still have a spindle of the buggers to go through, but thankfully(for me) I don't really use that laptop much.
the BEST CD-R's are manufactured by Taiyo Yuden, and are Gold-Green, really quite distinctive. Note that manufacturer is not the same as the distributor...
If in doubt- buy a small pack of the "most expensive" CD-Rs- for example, a 5-pack. Make sure it isn't lightscribe or special labels or whatnot that your paying for- you just want the discs. Hopefully you'll find success.
of course- if you have available CD-R with you, just test it out. Maybe my drive is just a crapster.
