problem with my dvd burner...

[shifted90]

Hello. I was trying to back up some home video DVDs with my DVD burner. I have a DVD-ROM, and a DVD-/+R/RW and I installed everything and put in my DVD in the DVD-ROM, and my blank DVD in my DVD writer. Then, I went to My Computer to check if the DVD-ROM and DVD-Writer are working. The problem is that when I open and close the DVD-ROM, the comptuer scans the DVD fine, then I open and close the DVD-Writer, and it scans that, but when I have 2 DVDs in at the same time, it only loads 1 DVD which means that I can't burn right off of the DVD. Also, on My Computer, the D:/ drive changes from DVD-RW Drive to DVD-ROM Drive and vice versa. I was guessing that it was my power supplies, but I am not sure. I have an HP computer with 250W power. It is an AMD Athlon XP 2600+, 512 DDR RAM, 120 GB 5400RPM HDD. I got this back when I didn't know how to build a computer... Any help would be appreciated...

[MikeV]

Sounds like your DVD-RW and DVD-ROM are both jumpered as master(or slave) on the same IDE channel. Open up the computer and verify/change your jumpers. Make the DVD-RW master and the DVD-ROM slave on the secondary IDE channel and try again.

[lenti_75]

the same

[shifted90]

Thanks guys. I'll give it a try. I haven't had time to look over everything because of practices and everything.

[shifted90]

One more thing. Before I installed this DVD-RW, I had a CD-RW and I took that out and put the DVD-RW in. Shouldn't it be working fine right now because I'm guessing that the CD-RW was the master drive...

[handyguy]

Nope, no cdrom is a master, the hd is the master. Take it out & set it the same way the cdrom was set.

[overloaded_ide]

Nope, no cdrom is a master, the hd is the master

Your wrong if I understand what your saying correctly. Hard drive is only Master if it Exists! One Hard drive on IDE 1 would be master. One CD Burner on IDE 2 would be Master. I do that when I only have 2 drives in a system. Both are Masters!
Add more drives and you have about any combo you want as long as Hard Drive on IDE 1 is master. And I dought if it even has to be master, though it should be!

When I lost my IDE 1 due to a loose cable I booted just fine to the 30gig drive I had installed as a slave on IDE 2 temporarily. So really, only way to know is check the jumpers. When I pushed the cable tight on the system board I went back to 4 drives again, 2 hard drives on IDE 1 and Master CD burner and Slave Hardrive on IDE 2!

I always have the main boot drive set to Master on IDE 1. Set other device to Slave, can be hard drive or burner, set IDE 2 devices as master and slave however you want.

Be aware various drives behave differently also. My Maxtors I can set to master and they work with or without a slave present.
WD drives do not! Set to Master slave present and take out the slave and it does not work! You have to set the jumper to master single drive! Then of course you cannot install the slave again unless you change the WD jumper again! Maybe not all WD drives are that way, but I have one and so does a nieghbour I just installed an OS for. He could not get the WD to install windows and boot. Install got as far as copied the files to the drive, then error we could not get past when it rebooted. Changed the jumper to master single and no problem. I think all the recent WD drives are this way that I have been installing, not sure the older ones. Mostly I do Maxtors.

So make sure the jumpers are correct for your setup, actually look at the drive and see what they should be set for. Like master single, master with slave present, etc... And some drives I have ran as slave without a master present also. So it just depends on the drives!

I would copy to hard drive first then burn, less chance of errors than on the fly. Otherwise if your going to do on the fly burning and have to change drives around, if you only have 3 drives, I would make the Hard drive IDE 1 master, The DVD-rom as IDE 1 Slave, The DVD Burner as IDE 2 master. That should give the best results for burning on the fly as well as Burning from the hard drive. But as long as the jumpers are correct you can put them anywhere basically. I have 2 burners on my main system both on IDE 2 so one HAS to be a master the other slave!