I managed to waste four of my blank DVD disks yesterday, when I was trying to create a Windows 10 DVD from the downloaded Windows 10 ISO file that I fetched from the Microsoft Techbench website. The DVD writer just won’t burn the ISO image no matter what I tried. First I tried burning the ISO image using ImgBurn (my personal favorite for burning ISO images to optical disks) and later using the Nero Suite that came bundeld with the LG DVD writer drive but to no avail. After wasting a few perfectly good disks and 40 minutes of my life, I decided that the DVD drive itself is faulty.
If you are also experiencing similar problems then you can save your time and perhaps blank disks by running a few checks on your optical disk drive using a software called Opti Drive Control. Although it is designed for older versions of Windows (Windows 7 to be precise), but it works flawlessly in Windows 8.1 and 10 too. Basically it puts your optical disk drive under various tests and checks to see if it is working as it should.
Opti Drive Control is available as a portable application and you can launch it without having to install it. You have to insert a data CD/DVD/Blueray disk into your optical disk drive before Opti Drive Control can run the tests. This disk is used to read data from and check the transfer rate of your optical drive.
Similar to the read test, Opti Drive Control has write tests too which can write to a blank disk to check if disk writing performance of your disk drive. Moreover, this software can also show useful information about the blank optical media itself so you can find out why a blank CD/DVD/Blueray of a particular brand is not working with your optical disk drive.
Opti Disk Control is a very useful application for everyone who uses optical disks regularly. It can not fix anything, but it can sure help you diagnose the problems that might be resulting in a disk burn failure.
You can download it from http://www.optidrivecontrol.com/.