My drive is a DVD+RW drive. Easy Creator identifies it as such also. When using drag to disc or trying to format a dvd, I always get a no disc found message. The same thing happens with a CD. If I try long enough I usually can format the CD. If finally I format a DVD, Roxio tells me it is not usable. I use the drive heavily to back up Photoshop album so I know the drive works,

Drag-to-Disc is the last thing you want to use to backup anything. It is a proprietary packet writing format and not reliable for long term storage. And as you are finding out, it can be rather fickle at times.

You should be using Creator Classic in EMC 7 to burn data to discs for backup.