Double Layer Disc?????? Please Help me Tech Gurus
 

So my HP Laptop goes Kablooy and I go to the Geek squad to recover my hard drive. You with me so far? Good
They back up everything to a Verbatim DVD + R DL 8.5 GB disc.
I stick it in my Dell Precision 380 tower and it shows a blank disc.
I then put it in my three year old Toshiba laptop and it reads it fine.
HELP!!!!!!!! What am I doing wrong?

Perhaps your Dell DVD player is a DVD-R? There are two basic (and competing) formats for DVD Rs, + and -. Drives that can do both are listed as DVD +-R. The dash in DVD-R is really a minus sign. It's different from DVD+R.

If you have to access the disc on your new machine why not put it into the old one, share the drive and read it over the network?

Your right, my IT guy (part time) and a friend ordered it with only one drive. Off to buy a new one.
Thanks

Most drives these days read both modes. You don't need two.

In the old days, though, there were plenty of drives that only read one of the two formats.

This computer isn't even three months old. We bought it as a server. I could pull the other one out but why. If I ever want to start a bootleg DVD business :D two would be handy.

3 months old and won't read it? Either it's a real cheap one or it's defective.

If the OP would post what the drive says on the front (DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD+-R, etc.) and/or the model we could probably help determine which it is :D