seeing how DVD writer devices are so cheap, I bought a Samsung Writemaster (SH-S182M) that can read and write a whole bunch of CD and DVD formats, including DVD-RAM. I did a small research (google, wiki) about DVD-RAMs and considered it so nifty that I immediately bought a DVD-RAM disc as well, happy and all to check it out. However, the procedure described as drag'n'drop turned out to be not so easy. Samsung for some reason I can't understand didn't include any drivers whatsoever (checked the included CD-ROM twice). The included software (Nero 5 OEM and InCD 4) refused to recognize the inserted DVD-RAM disc and I wasn't able to format it either.
Eventually I had to download a DVD-RAM driver, using the bundled utility DVDForm I tried to format the new DVD-RAM disc to UDF 1.5 filesystem, which failed after about 13 minutes saying: "DVDForm cannot format this disc. Check disc and try again". OK, so I took the disc out, wiped it a bit with my t-shirt, despite the recommendation on the casing not to do so. I also did a firmware update of the DVD writer drive (which surprisingly went without problems ) and tried again to format the DVD-RAM disc using DVDForm (still UDF 1.5). It looked promising, after the progress bar went almost to completion after 40 minutes, but then it stayed like that for another 20 minutes (although the program itself said the whole process should "take 35 to 45 minutes"), then it hanged and then a message box appeared, saying that I can't write on the disc.
Inserting the disc again, the program says that the disc is physically unformatted. Great.
This is my first time working with a DVD-RAM, so I understand I could be doing something wrong. Please, could someone kindly guide me through this magic process, or hint what I am doing wrong? Thanks in advance.
My DVD Writer is Samsung SH-S182M (latest firmware) and the DVD-RAM disc is a 4.7GB Panasonic 2X/3X one-sided non-cartridge, conforming DVD-RAM version 2.1 standard.