CD Burner question...TDK VeloCD 32/10/40

[takasan]

Help,

I have the above in a Shuttle SK41G w/Athlon XP 2500; 512 DDR and 120 GB HD.

The burner has not made one coaster. Never a problem with the burner doing what it is supposed to do.

That being said...it is the culprit, at least 2 months testing EVERYTHING, in making my system hang. I run Win2K and after some intense usenet downloads and shuffling data from partition to partition if I open the "My Computer" icon the system will list the drives until it reaches my Compact Disc and just freezes. Now I have changed the drive letter to move it up and down in the 'my comp' list to see if it would stop the system and it does. The list always freezes while listing the 'Compact Disc' drive. I have unplugged it from my system and repeated the big downloads and data shuffling and even some extra music and media playing and the system then runs golden without a hitch.

So my solution, if you can call it that, is to keep the device unplugged until I start long burning sessions and then put it back on until the burning is done...hmm not very convenient.

Could this be a firmware issue? I have had no luck in telling TDK that the burner is great but it just doesn't play well with others. Any ideas would be great, thankyou in advance.

PS any tips on other burners to buy?

[ckdexterhn1]

Is it master, slave, cable select, what? Are you should you have the pins set correctly?

[Solarjetman]

That is a tough one. I had a similair problem a few years back and required replacement. I was a little different. It happened whenever I tried to open a CD. But the outcome was the same. But you seem to be able to burn just fine. That makes me think it is Windows Explorer. Do you have any other drives in the system that act the same way? Can you boot with a boot disk and read the CD from the DOS prompt? Remember you will need to load drivers for this as DOS cannot nativly view them, a WinME boot disk will work, not sure about 98.

A work-around instead of physically removing and installing the drive could be to set up hardware profiles. You could just disable it while you do not intend on using it, then enable it when you do. It would require much less effort.

If you decide to buy a new drive, I really like my Plexor Plexwriter 24x. Never had problems.