How to Burn a CD or DVD in Windows 11

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The post provides a guide on how to burn a CD or DVD on Windows 11. Although less popular due to cheaper, larger capacity thumb drives, burning a CD/DVD remains an option for content backup or transfer. The process involves inserting a blank disc into an optical drive and following the provided instructions to burn…

This post shows students and new users steps to burn a CD or DVD on Windows 11. Although burning content onto a CD or DVD is no longer popular, it’s still possible in Windows 11.

Assuming your Windows device has an optical media drive capable of writing content to a CD/DVD, Windows 11 makes writing “burn” a CD-R or DVD-R disc easy. Burning or writing content to a CD/DVD is like backing up the original content on the computer.

The burned disc can then be transferred to another device or stored in a secured location for safekeeping. A CD/DVD can also perform a full Windows image backup. With the arrival of larger and cheaper thumb drives, CDs/DVDs are not as popular for writing or backing up content as before.

To burn content to a CD/DVD, you’ll also need some blank CD-R, CD-RW, DVD-R, or DVD-RW discs that work with your drive.

Below are details of CD/DVD one can use to write content.

  • CD-R, DVD-R: These disc types only allow data to be written to the disc. They cannot be erased.
  • CD-RW, DVD-RW: These disc types allow data to be written to and erased from the disc.

Most devices will come with a CD-R/DVD-R, allowing content to be written to either CD or DVDs.

How to burn content to a CD or DVD in Windows 11

Now that you know a thing or two about burning content to an optical disc, let’s continue below to see how it’s done.

By default, Windows will automatically initiate when you insert a blank recordable CD or DVD into your optical drive. When you do that, a “Burn a Disc” window will appear.

Here are the options you’re given to write content to a disc:

  • Like a USB flash drive: This allows you to save, edit and delete files to the disc anytime.
  • With a CD/DVD player: This is a more traditional method of “mastering” discs. When you copy files to the drive, they are temporarily copied to a staging area on your hard disk first, then when ready, simply select Burn in File Explorer.

Click Next to continue.

The disc should open in File Explorer, where you can drag and drop or copy and paste content. After copying the content to the disc, click the Burn command in File Explorer to begin burning the content.

After a brief moment, when the disc is successfully burned, click the Finish button to complete the process.

That should do it!

Conclusion:

This post showed you how to burn a disc in Windows 11. Please use the comment form below if you find any errors above or have something to add.

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9 responses to “How to Burn a CD or DVD in Windows 11”

  1. Martin W Avatar
    Martin W

    When inserting a blank DVD+RW disc, the “Burn a Disc” window does not appear.

  2. rocco Avatar
    rocco

    after dragging the files to new disc, the window shows a list of the files with a top header which says, “Files Ready to Be Written to the Disc,” but i can’t find a way to complete the process!

  3. rocco Avatar
    rocco

    additionally, there is no “You have successfully burned your files to the disc” pop-up window.
    after the files are copied [in spirit, i’m guessing,] a new explorer window opens with the ‘…ready to be…” message.

  4. David Avatar
    David

    Yup, this doesn’t seem to work. Bad advice, but what do you expect from Windows?

  5. Vicki Avatar
    Vicki

    My old faithful dell died at 14 years old so I bought the new dell Enspirion 3880 window 11 and it sucks! It’s not an update, they changed the whole program! Yes, I also tried these “how to burn instructions” with the same results as the above consumers. I’ve been disappointed with this since the day I got it. I’ve decided since being extremely happy with my iPhones for the last 12 years, guess it’s time to switch to APPLE for my office needs…I’ll be donating this piece of crap.
    PS I wrote this on my wonderful iPad 🙂

  6. RayKay Avatar
    RayKay

    There is no burn to disk option after dragging the files over and following the instructions. And the author hasn’t updated it. I have Windows 11. Rather useless article.

  7. RayKay Avatar
    RayKay

    As it doesn’t show in this article the “Burn to disk” option, I found it here:
    https://www.simplified.guide/microsoft-windows/burn-iso-image

    After dragging the files over to the DVD drive, in the Windows Explorer window you’ll see a button of 3 black dots at the top right of the Eject button. In there is “Burn to disc”.

  8. wazza Avatar
    wazza

    this only words for data DVD’s not video DVD’s i.e ones that work on a standalone DVD player, which is mostly used in installations in art

  9. John Bancker Avatar
    John Bancker

    Yes I am 75 years old and I like CD’s but unable to do so. I just may have to get a refurbished older computer or do you think if I purchased a cd burner software like Nero or something like that will work with windows 11. Windows 11 the biggest mistake I ever made.

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