CD-RW woes

[Nick Scott]

This is such a weird thing. I have never come across it before and I would be very grateful if anyone can shed some light on what is going on.

I have an old Celeron 300A PC, with 48 Mb RAM, running Windows 98 First edition. I have put an LG CD-RWer into it in addition to the existing CD-ROM. I have double-checked that both drives are cabled, powered and jumpered correctly, but when I try to use either Cd drive Windows explorer crashes (explorer.exe). To be exact the CPU seems to go to 100% utilisation, and the the PC grinds to a halt. It doesn't matter whether it is a pressed (audio or game) CD or a blank CD-R/RW. The result is always the same.

I tried experimenting with the DMA settings, but it hasn't made any difference, whether DMA is on or off on either device. Interestingly I found that if I boot up with a disk in the drive I can then read from it, play audio and/or Read and write to it with the RW. Reasoning that it might not have enough power I upgraded the PSU to a 350W unit, but again this hasn't made any difference.

I have now taken the old CD-ROM drive out of the machine leaving just the RWer in there. Now it will read from the drive OK, but only one type of disk per Windows session. If the first disk that goes in is a CD-RW then I can use that type of disk Ok for the rest of the session. Put in an audio CD and crash, down goes explorer.exe again, 100% CPU and reboot time. The opposite is also true. If the first disk is an audio/game CD then that also is fine for the entire session, but if I want to use the CD-RW to burn a disk I have to reboot first.

Its almost like there is something wrong with the Auto-insert notification module of Windows, but I have never heard of anything like this before. Anyone out there can tell me what on earth is going on?

 

[~Candy~]

Have you tried unchecking the 'auto insert notification' and restarting the computer?

 

[Rockn]

Are there any drivers loading from your config.sys and autoexec.bat for the regular CD-ROM? Open up the system icon from control panel and look at the performance tab to see if anything is using DOS compatibility mode.

 

[slipe]

It is the packet writing component of the burner software that recognizes CDR and RW discs and opens the wizard or activates the packet writing software if the CD is formatted. I would suspect the packet writing software.

First get all of the updates for your software – Roxio separates the EZCD and DirectCD updates so you have to get both. See if LG has a firmware update. These steps alone solve many burner problems.

If no joy, uninstall and reinstall your burner software. Many packet writing components have a separate uninstall so make sure you get both.

If you are still having problems try just uninstalling the packet writing component. The mastering software works fine without it.

 

[Nick Scott]

Auto-insert doesn't seem to make any difference, apart from giving error messages that Direct Cd may not work properly without it.

There isn't anything loading from autoexec.bat or config.sys for the CD, so that can't be it. I wish it was that easy!

I will see if I can borrow a copy of a different packet writing app like InCD or something and install that in place of Direct CD. I'll let you know if that makes a difference. Thanks guys.