You say that you can format the discs, this indicates to me that there is no apparent conflict stopping the laser from going into "write" mode. Be absolutely sure that you're using CD-RW discs where necessary - you don't "format" a CD-R disc as the data is written in a continuous spiralling track, there is no concept of "tracks", "sectors", etc. as there is with a hard disk or CD-RW disc.

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