Burning CDs on Windows Server 2008

Posted on by

A while back I mentioned that I was unable to burn a CD on my Windows Server 2008 box.  At that point I didn’t have time to figure out what was going on.  Today I needed to burn a CD, and had some time to fiddle with it.

On my Windows XP development box, I used ISO Recorder to burn ISO images to CD.  There’s not much to the program:  just right-click on a .iso file and select “Burn to CD” from the popup menu.  It’s simple and it works.  I wish all software worked so well.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear to work on my Server 2008 box.  The program doesn’t recognize my CD/DVD burner.

A bit of searching located ImgBurn, a free CD/DVD reader and recorder that works on all versions of Windows, including 64-bit versions.  This is more of a full-featured application than ISORecorder, but still quite easy to use.  It took me no time at all to start the program and tell it to burn an ISO image to CD.

I don’t know why ISORecorder won’t recognize the CD burner on my box.  The program says it works for Vista, so I imagine it should also work on Server 2008.  But it doesn’t and I don’t have the time or inclination to figure out why.  I’ve found ImgBurn, and I’m happy.

Update 2008/12/13

I tried to burn another CD today, and ImgBurn failed to recognize the recorder.  It turns out that I have to run the program with elevated privileges (i.e. “Run as Administrator”).  I didn’t have to do that the first time, because I started ImgBurn from the installation program, which was already running as Administrator.

Also of note:  ImgBurn will not work if Windows Media Player is running.  At least, it won’t on my machine.  Media Player apparently locks or otherwise allocates the optical drive by default.  Perhaps there’s a way to turn that “feature” off, I don’t know.

I suspect that ISORecorder will work, too, if I try it in Administrator mode.  The beauty of ISORecorder is that all I have to do is right-click on a .ISO file, and it will be written to the CD.  But I don’t know how to make that program run with Administrator privileges.