There is no disc in the drive. Please insert a writable CD into drive.
I ran into this message and had a tough time getting past it: “There is no disc in the drive. Please insert a writable CD into drive.” This was on a Windows computer running XP.
The drive would read CDs that had information on them without a problem. I just got the error message when I tried to burn something onto a blank CD. I did all the troubleshooting steps of making sure the CDs were compatible with the drive, making sure I had the updated drivers installed, deleting the drive from device manager and letting it reinstall, cleaning the lens, etc. I went to the drive Properties and made sure that under the Recording tab the box was checked that said “enable cd recording on this drive”. I changed registry keys, and I verified that the computer was not running any third party cd burning software such as Roxio or Nero. None of this would get the error message to go away.
I finally discovered that the IMAPI service was not automatically running, and though I would manually start it, it would not stay on. After a little more digging it seems that there was a conflict between this and the XP SP3 update. I unstalled service pack 3 and the error message went away. I was able to burn CDs again. I don’t know that this is a perfect fix, but it got me where I needed to be.