Thank you for posting this. I too, have a Dell DW316 CD/DVD writer, and out of curiosity decided to see if I was experiencing the same issue. Sure enough, I was with my own Dell Inspiron. However, the drive worked fine with other Windows 10 systems. Note that with my Inspiron, I was able to format a DVD RW, but only with the Live file system (mastered option was grayed out). Also, connecting other CD/DVD drives to my Inspiron resulted in the same behavior as well, so the problem isn't limited to the DW316. After a few hours, I found a solution that appears to have fully restored the format operation. Follow the instructions in the answer post on this Microsoft Communities thread. All you have to do is open the Windows Registry Editor and delete the NoCDBurning DWORD key from two locations... HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer & HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer Restart your computer and you should now be able to format blank DVDs again. A quick question... Did you install the CyberLink software that came with the Dell DW316? I wonder if that changed something, though it appears that other Dell users with different drives and recording software have experienced similar issues as well. Seems like it's Dell related.
Just after a Dell updated my system, my external dvd writer; Dell DW316, stopped allowing me to format blank DVDs. the option is visible, but I can not click on it. The option does not show up on the right click of the drive. The drive works on the already formatted disks, it reads and write but new disks it will not accept even though the computer tells me to format the disks. Can someone help me solve this problem?
DW316, used to format DVD but still read and burns to previous disks