Additional CD-RW/DVD Drive Crashing Computer

[MarcNJ]

I just recently purchased an HP Pavilion a6110n desktop and wiped out Vista Home Premium to install WinXP Pro on it. Then, I installed Vista Home Premium (my own copy) onto the machine in a secondary partition (so that WinXP would be the primary OS on the C: drive and Vista Home Premium would be a secondary OS on another drive). I then found an extra IDE hard drive and CD-RW/DVD drive laying around, and decided to install both of them on the machine (the already installed hard drive and DVD drive area SATA). I installed them with an IDE cable, and when I restarted WinXP it picked them both up. The hard drive works fine, but there is a problem with the CD-RW/DVD drive. Whenever I attempt to use it, my machine freezes and I have to restart it. Windows XP refers to this drive as HL-DT-ST RW/DVD GCC-4320B. Any help or further troubleshooting ideas are greatly appreciated. Thanks.

- Marc

 

[cjelec]

Do you know the power supply wattage?

 

[wahnula]

Check the jumpers. The hard drive should be Master and the CD-ROM should be Slave. There is usually a diagram etched in the drive case. On older hardware, remove and re-seat the jumpers. Watch out for "Master with slave following" jumper setting on older HDDs.

Tony

"If it can't take it, I don't want it

 

[ceh4702]

Then uninstall one of these pieces of junk.

What kind of IDE cable is it? If it has connectors that are Blue and Black and Gray, then it is a Cable Select Cable. If that is the case then set the jumpers to CS.

It may be unwise to add a bunch of drives that you dont really need. Some of the Drivers for DVD and CD recordable drives write things to the registry or prefer to be the Master on the Cable. If you want to use IDE you may want the burner to be master. A second drive is just for backup and does not have to be the master. What I am trying to say is some of the drivers like to default to D or the first Optical drive by default. This can cause conflicts. Sometimes just rearranging the order of the drives helps.

If you do not like my post feel free to point out your opinion or my errors.

 

[gbaughma]

It may be that the other drive doesn't support DMA transfer. Try turning that off first.



Just my 2¢
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--Greg

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