Dead DRU500A - Bios not detecting

[hamiltong]

PIII 1G / Asus CUSL2-C with 1009 bios
PS Antec 300W 7A
512 RAM
IBM 80GIG GXP (Primary Master)
DRU500A (Secondary Master)
SB LIVE
FIREWIRE card
NIC Card
OS - WINXP PRO (no service pack)

Got DRU500A installed on Thursday. Bios picked it up no problem. Installed latest editions CDRWIN and NERO.. Worked perfectly burning CDRs.. I burnt 8 CDRs without a hitch

Friday.. Booted up and slapped in UT2K3 CD.. Drive started spinning and kept on spinning. DRU500 light on solid.. Computer sluggish.. CPU floating up and down around 22%.. Couldn't eject disk.. Powered down and BIOS wouldn't recognize drive. I pulled the pwr cable and entered bios which was sluggish as well.. After powering down for a couple of minutes the system booted up recognizing the DRU500 again (got my UT2K3 disc out - finally). Operated normally for about an hour - then started acting up again. Strange stuff.. when I'd press the eject button it would come out a couple of millimeters and start dancing like it was trying to read a disk via tray movement as opposed to laserblock movement..

It was intermittently after a lengthy powerdown coming back alive. I tried moving the DRU500 around in the case, using different IDE cables, using different pwr sources from the powersupply, throwing it on the primary as slave, cable select .... everything.. nothing would produce a stable environment.. I tried upgrading my bios even using beta vers 1014.. reseting bios, loading and only using bios defaults..etc. Nothing was working. And of course when I called it into Sony tech support it was working flawlessly while they were attending to me on the phone.. hehe

Saturday, booted no problem recognized the drive and started to act up again... I gave up.. Back it went..

I actually noticed in the event viewer that the DRU500A was suddenly disappearing every so often.

Personally, I'm waiting for the next round of burners to jump back in.. -gh

[fourthquark]

This may be an issue with the CUSL2-C and/or the BIOS. I have Windows 2000 Pro on a machine similar to yours (CUSL2-C, 1009 BIOS, Maxtor 40GB HD as master on IDE1, Hitachi DVD-ROM drive as slave on IDE1, Maxtor 80GB HD as master on IDE2, and Yamaha CR4416 CDRW drive as slave on IDE2). It periodically behaves in a way similar to what you describe. It starts with the CR4416 not recognizing the media in the drive and not ejecting. The computer appears hung up for a while. Then Win2K gets confused and warns me that I heve unplugged removeable drives without first ejecting them and that I might lose data (this is in reference to the HD and CR4416 on IDE2, which are not removable drives!). The problem is always with the drives on IDE2, never with IDE1.

The fix for me is to shut down and restart, go into BIOS setup, leave the drive selections on Autodetect, and sequentially highlight each of the drives on IDE2 and press the Enter key. This seems to force an autodetect. I then exit BIOS (save settings) and the problem is fixed until next time.

[hamiltong]

Even with the DRU500A on primary slave it was acting up..

I have the BIOS IDE settings as AUTO.. It sometimes would come up with random characters displayed in the field (normally reads SONY DRU500A). BIOS acted just as sluggish as the OS.. I guess it's having a hard time with the DRU500A.

When I put my Pioneer 115 DVD-ROM back in everything is smooth sailing (secondary master).

I suspect the DRU500A is faulty primarily.. and perphaps the DRU500A + CUSL2-C combo secondly. -gh