Hardware :: Can Burn CD-R/DVD-R But Not CD-RW/DVD-RW

I have a DVD burner in an external USB enclosure. It works fine for reading CDs and DVDs, and for burning DVD-R and CD-R discs, but I can't get it to write to any CD-RW discs, and rarely DVD-RW. (The DVD-RW has worked maybe 3 or 4 times out of dozens of attempts, and only using K3B) I have also had the same problem burning CD-RWs in a CD burner in a different USB enclosure. Brasero almost always displays 'No disc available' if a rewriteable disc is in the drive - sometimes after a couple of minutes it will display the correct volume label, but if I try to write to it, either blanking it or writing files to it, it goes back to displaying the 'No disc available' again.

K3B finds the disk and displays the volume label without any problem, but when I try to write to it K3B complains that it can't unmount the volume and fails, then ejects the disc. Gnome CD Master can't even find the burner regardless of the disk type! I'm baffled as to why this would be happening like this. All I can think of is that it's either an obscure permissions issue, or a USB issue. I have given myself every remotely relevant permission I can think of, but maybe there's some other security setting I don't know about.

The drive and mounted disc usually show up in file managers, but I have noticed that sometimes the drive will suddenly disappear from the mounted drive list, and become unresponsive. The only thing that gets the drive working again is to reboot the computer - just switching the drive off and back on again doesn't fix it - so I suspect maybe my Mint 9 installation (Gnome with KDE additions, but the problem has existed since I first installed it as pure Gnome) has some issues with the USB connections, but that's just a wild guess, and I've never had a problem using USB flash drives. I have used a variety of disc brands with no difference. Dare I say it, but Windows has no problems with any of this - any of these discs can be read, written, blanked and rewritten effortlessly in Windows. Sigh. At the risk of providing too much information I'm going to follow the advice from the Linux Mint forum, and include outputs for lsusb and lspci.

lsusb output:

Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub

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