Installed new hard drive, now I can't burn CDs! (1 Viewer)

[Timon Russo]

I put a second IDE hard drive in my Dell Dim. 4500 recently. Since I have a DVD+RW and a ZIP drive, I had only 1 IDE connection left for it, but the cable wasn't long enough to stretch down to the hard drive bays. Soooo... I got a longer cable with, I think, 3 connecters on it. It works. Only now, when I try to make a music CD, it seems to crap out while writing the first song. No errors are reported in Roxio, it just locks up. In Media Player, it takes a while, then closes the session and spits the disc out. But, I have used DirectCD to make data disks, and I have even written a DVD from Pinnacle Studio 9, and those worked fine. Any ideas? Its a Philips DVD+RW-D28. Came with the Dell. Is my IDE cable too long or something? I tried limiting the write speed (down to 4x from 12x, same problem). Help!

 

[Jon_Gregory]

Look in your event viewer in windows and see what is in there. Right click My Computer and choose manage and look in the application event viewer to see if there are any errors being reported there.

 

[brentl]

Did you check on your seeting in the master and slave relationship?

I found this happened when I didn't check my setting, it would show the drive, but I couldn't write to it.

Brent

 

[Max Leung]

Yep, check your drives' master/slave settings.

One of the drives should be master, the other slave. Do NOT use cable select on either one.

 

[Timon Russo]

I tried setting the DVD+RW from cable select to master, but that didn't seem to change anything, so I started from scratch, swapping out that long IDE cable I was using for shorter ones, and reconfiguring it so both HDs were on one, and the DVD+RW and ZIP drive were on the other (I avoided doing that before because I thought it would cause all sorts of problems).

Now everything works fine. I believe it was the extra long IDE cable. Strange that some burning operations worked and others did not, though.

Thanks for all your help guys!