I tried geek squad and fry's and tried cd dvd burners that have a logo indicating "WORKS WITH WINDOWS VISTA" and nothing has worked! i tried SATA and IDE and usb (internal and external) and nothing has worked! i need this working and my pc will be complete! windows update didn't work either! i cant use the cd the burner came with because obviously the cd drive doesn't work! somebody please help!

Plenty of them work just fine... in fact, I haven't found one that doesn't work yet. Exactly what happens when you install the burner... did you check the jumper settings at the back of the drive? Is the drive recognized in the BIOS? Is the drive recognized in Windows Device Manager.....? In Windows Explorer?
You haven't given us enough information to help much further, the only thing I can suggest is that you repost, telling us exactly what you have done so we can try to assist further, but I've used Pioneer, Samsung and Sony DVD burners without any problems whatsoever. Cari (MS-MVP) Windows Technologies - Printing & Imaging coribright.com/windows
"foofighter06"

well yes i did try pioneer and it was supposed to work with windows vista but see as i set it up it recognizes it on the bios and everything but when it tries to install it it fails giving me a (code 39) corrupt or missing driver. so theres nothign i can do! how do i fix this? and yes it does show up in device manager.
"Cari (MS-MVP)" wrote:

I asked that question a while back and got quite a few suggestions. I decided to go with a Samsung, the SH-S183L SATA. So far it's been great. I haven't tried everything yet. But everything I've done works, including burning movies with DVD Maker.
"foofighter06"

P.S. I didn't install ANY software that came with the drive. I suggest you do the same. Just forget about the CDs that come with it. You start installing that XP software in Vista and you're probably just create problems for yourself.
"foofighter06"

oh wow so the samsung you bought was internal and all you did was put it in and turn on the pc and let it install by itself? because external didn't work on mine either so something is suspicious! ok, i put a full install of windows vista home premium on a new hard drive by the way! do u have home premium or ultimate? and where did you buy the samsung burner? i see you had the same problem as i did...let me know where you bought it and i will try to get one for myself!
"Puppy Breath" wrote:

i went to look for that burner today and found nothing but the samsungs that i would find were not SH-S183L they were SH-S182L so i got sceptical and didn't buy them! are you sure you wrote it right!
"Puppy Breath" wrote:

Here's the page on that drive:
samsung.com/Products/OpticalDiscDrive/DVDWriter/OpticalDiscDrive_DVDWriter_SH_S183L.asp
Basically I built the machine from scratch. I installed XP first (since you always want to install the older OS first). That's it, just XP. Then I fired up XP and installed Vista from there. The only thing I had to do after that was install the motherboard drivers to get my Ethernet connection working for Internet access.
I'm pretty impressed with the Samsung drive. It's fast and quiet. I wasn't totally thrilled with the LightScribe printing, which I've only done in XP so far. It was a little light, even at the Best quality setting. I don't know if I'll be able to get better quality or not from a different LightScribe program.

"foofighter06"

by any chance is this wher you bought it?
"Puppy Breath" wrote: