Computer Help Please - UPDATED

[SMW]

Can anyone help – I am a computer novice !

A while ago I had problems burning music to CD’s – it would complete the process but only the first few (3 or 4 tracks) would ever play and the other tracks couldn’t be found i.e the CD player would whirr but not locate the track positions.

Thinking the CD writer was at fault I have bought a new drive. When installing it the instructions advised to set the rear jumpers to slave or master position or if replacing a drive to use the existing jumper settings – these were pegged to the left on the old drive which I think is ICEL position ? Although I don’t know what this means !

Anyway as the old drive did work once and I haven't altered the jumpers on the old one I set the new drive that way and heres my dumb bit – the large tape (ribbon) of cables (technical term !) which runs from the board to the CD drive has 2 connectors on it – the one on the end is labelled drive 0 and one about half way is labelled drive 1. I can’t remember which connector was on the old drive but I have tried it in both positions. In drive 0 position (the end) I can just about access files on Cd but it is very slow and in the 1 position the drive seems to work fine for example can play music CD’s or software CD’s will autostart and drive runs fast.

HOWEVER I can still not burn CD’s – I am using good quality discs. If I use media player I get a message to the effect ‘unable to finalize disk – your disk might be dirty or corrupt try a better quality disk’ and if I use Nero I get ‘DMA error unable to write to disk – unable to write end disk process’.

Anyone got any ideas – answers in simple terms please !

Thanks in anticipation!

Steve

[MarcTS]

Try a different IDE cable (the large tape (ribbon) of cables) and see if that improves matters. I'm assuming that as you tried Dev0 and Dev1 on the cable that you don't have another drive (hard drive or cd/dvd drive) attached? If not I would strongly suggest setting the jumper on your cdrw drive to Master.

[SMW]

I have an external hard drive for storage via USB connection and there is an internal floppy drive which has it's own ribbon thingy

[cfc1]

Make sure DMA mode is enabled... here will show you how...

http://www.onthegosoft.com/dma_setting_nt.htm

If not.. this.......

http://forum.digital-digest.com/showthread...;threadid=45942

.....might help.

[SMW]

OK thanks for all the help.

It's getting weird.

I already had DMA set if available on the secondary IDE channel. I have changed it to PIO only and can burn - although slow - I think it's burning data at about 14.4. BUT I can burn a CD . . . obvioulsy would like to use DMA as CPU is @ 100 % when burning and can't run in background - so anyone shed any further light now on the problem which is obvioulsy DMA related ?