How to get Sonic CD/DVD burning software to create a log file for debugging

I learned a cool trick last week that might be useful if you are running into issues while using the built-in Sonic CD/DVD burning software in Media Center 2005. The following steps will enable creation of a log file for debugging purposes:

  1. Click on the Start menu, choose Run and type notepad %windir%\ehome\createdisc\soniclog_mce.log
  2. Click Yes to create a new file in this location
  3. Close Notepad and click Yes to save the file

Once you have created this file, any subsequent times that you use Sonic burning functionality inside of Media Center, it will write to this file. This file has to already exist before Sonic will write to it however, so it will not log any error information until you manually go and create a new file with the expected name in this location.

If you run into any issues with CD/DVD burning, please create this log file and include it when contacting me or your customer support representative. I'd also encourage you to open up the log file and take a look at it yourself as well. There are some errors that have relatively simple workarounds that can be determined simply by looking at the error log information.

Hope this helps....