OK,
I wanted to burn a large file to CD, so I right-clicked the file, chose Send-To and selected my read-write CD drive, where a nice fresh blank CD was waiting.
This will usually put an icon in your system tray, but if you are like me and a bit slow to react, the icon will vanish. No worries, I clicked on Start, then My Computer, and then double-clicked my CD drive.
The familiar “Write these files to CD” link appeard in the upper left hand part of the window, and I clicked that, eagerly awaiting the burning of my files.
I was a bit annoyed when the CD Writing Wizard popped up, let me name the CD and then, after clicking Next, I got “There is no disc in the drive.” There certainly WAS a disc in the drive!
After reading a few posts on the web, I found this one (which has lots more troubleshooting stuff if you need it). In the post it said to try clicking Start, then My Computer, then right-click the CD drive and choose properties. There should be a “recording” tab with the “Enable CD Recoding on this drive” checked.
In my case it WAS checked, but another post in that same thread said to uncheck it and recheck it, so I unchecked it, clicked OK, and then navigated back to that same properties tab, rechecked it and clicked OK.
I then retried the steps to burn the CD and it worked. I guess sometimes you have to remind your computer that certain boxes are checked. Go figure. Just thought I would share, for the benefit of CD burning XP users at large.
Happy Burning! (CDs… please, keep it to CDs…)