My ASUS DRW 1612BL DVD drive is not burning any DVD. Sometime it takes too long time to read a dvd file. I had used this hundreds of time burning new disc. It is not at all a old optical drive. I had installed Vista on second partition. I am having a dual boot system now. In XP things went fine, but in Vista there is some issue with dvd burning.
There might be some compatibility issue with Vista drivers. I had seen that disc burned on XP are not accessible in Vista and due to which this kind of common problem appears. There is no hardware fault in the system. My DVD also stopped working when I had upgraded to Vista. Later on I downloaded fresh optical drive drivers from the official site and it worked.
The problem is with the driver for the JMicro IDE controller.
Out of the box, Vista uses a standard microsoft driver for the JM36x IDE controller and all works fine. A few weeks ago, JMicro released a driver that came through auto updates - this driver is screwy and causes your dvd burner to no longer be seen as a burner by windows.
Go to Device Manager, and look at the properties for your JM36x IDE controller. You need to roll this back to the generic microsoft one. You should be able to click "Rollback Driver" on the properties screen.