How can I check my CD/DVD drive?

I spent several hours troubleshooting why I cannot burn a DVD without errors. I suspected the software (Pinnacle Studio 20) and made several changes including changing menus and burning w/o menus. Also tried burning the image file with other software (Nero). Tried using other writeable media also with no joy. Nothing worked. Then I decided to burn the image with an external burner, and it worked. Burned other images that wouldn't burn with my internal burner and they all played fine.

Device Manager claims that the burner is working properly.

I know that burners are fairly cheap and I'm considering replacing mine with a BluRay Read/write burner, but I'm concerned that after replacing the drive there may be some other problem not with the burner itself.

Is there freeware/trialware or some other recommended way to check to see if my existing burner is healthy?

It could be a driver issue, a firmware package update is needed. You need to take the make/model and look that up on the vendors website for help.

Have you tried the built-in Windows burning utility?

As regards post #2, I haven't seen an optical drive in 20 years that needed special drivers (other than those in Windows), but I suppose that it's not impossible.

It's nice to have a BD burner. If you need more capacity than a single layer DVD, dual layer DVS are undesirable because of their slow write speeds. If you buy a BD burner, you may wish to consider one that supports BDXL (100GB). BDXL blank disks are expensive and may never become popular (which means they'll stay expensive), but they don't suffer the speed penalty of DVD-DL.

bobkn is right. The only driver for optical drives is the built in Microsoft driver. Years ago there were drivers that needed to be loaded in the .bat file that was loaded at boot up.