When you attempt to burn data to a compact disc recordable (CD-R) drive or compact disc rewritable (CD-RW) drive, you may not have the option to send data to the CD-ROM drive.

When you view the properties of the CD-R drive or CD-RW drive, you may notice that the Recording tab is not displayed in the CD Drive (drive_letter:) Properties dialog box, where drive_letter is the letter of the CD-R drive or CD-RW drive.

Note To view the CD Drive (drive_letter:) Properties dialog box, click Start, click My Computer, right-click the CD-R drive or CD-RW drive that you want, and then click Properties on the shortcut menu.

Additionally you may receive the following error message:

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This issue can occur when the drive is misdetected as a non-recordable device.

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To resolve this issue, edit the Microsoft Windows registry to identify the CD-R drive or CD-RW drive as a recordable drive. To do this, follow these steps.Important This section, method, or task contains steps that tell you how to modify the registry. However, serious problems might occur if you modify the registry incorrectly. Therefore, make sure that you follow these steps carefully. For added protection, back up the registry before you modify it. Then, you can restore the registry if a problem occurs. For more information about how to back up and restore the registry, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

1.	Click Start, and then click Run.
2.	In the Open box, type regedit, and then click OK.
3.	Expand the following registry subkey: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\CD Burning\Drives
4.	On the File menu, click Export.
5.	In the File name box, type backup of drives key, and then click Save. Note You can restore this registry subkey by double-clicking the backup of drives key.reg file that you saved.
6.	In the left pane of the Registry Editor window, click the Volume{GUID} folder under Drives, where GUID is a 32-character hexadecimal globally unique identifier. Note If you have more than one CD-ROM drive in the computer, an additional Volume{GUID} folder is listed for each drive.
7.	In the right pane of the Registry Editor window, double-click Drive Type.
8.	In the Value data box, type 1 or 2, depending on the drive type, and then click OK. The drive type should be 1 if it is a CD-R and 2 if it is a CD-RW.
9.	Quit Registry Editor.
10.	Click Start, and then click My Computer.
11.	Under Devices with Removable Storage, right-click the CD-R drive or CD-RW drive, and then click Properties on the shortcut menu.
12.	If the Recording tab is displayed, Windows recognizes the drive as a recordable device.
13.	Click Cancel. Note If you have more than one CD-ROM drive, DVD-ROM drive, or CD-RW drive in the computer and the Recording tab is not displayed, an incorrect drive may have been configured as "recordable" in the Windows registry. To troubleshoot this issue, follow these steps: a. Follow steps 1 through 9 to edit the Drive Type value of the Volume{GUID} folder whose value you previously changed. b. In the Value data box, type 3, and then click OK. The drive type value of 3 indicates that the drive is a standard CD-ROM and is not writable. c. In the left pane of the Registry Editor window, click the next Volume{GUID} folder. d. Follow steps 7 and 8 to change the Value data entry to 1 or 2, depending on the drive type. e. Quit Registry Editor, and then follow steps 10 through 12 to confirm that the Recording tab is displayed in the properties dialog box of the CD-R drive or CD-RW drive.

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This procedure may not work in all cases. This is only a workaround in a situation where the CD-R drive or CD-RW drive is capable of functioning in Windows XP and for some reason has been misidentified. If the drive is not on the Hardware Compatibility List (HCL), the drive may not work with the built-in CD copying functionality, regardless of this registry setting.

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