Bought an Optorite burner the other day and for the past day and a half i've been tryin to figure out what the hell is wrong. when i first installed it, i loaded a setup disk for nero or some other program and the program would start loading and crashed. Checked the event log and found a message that said "the driver detected a controller error on \device\Cdrom\0" researched it a little and it said the most probable cause was a faulty ide cable. so i bought a new 40 pin and tried that, didn't work so i got an ultra ATA cable as well with no success. Since then i've updated the firmware on the drive itself, flashed the bios as well. I've moved it around to differnt positions as well as switched cable positions as well. Pretty much every combo on between the two IDE cables. Discovered that it worked in safe mode and after a little more research realized that was because safe mode only used PIO mode for the drives. Now the thing is that before installing i had a dvd rom and a cd writer on my secondary IDE cable with no problem and i'm almost positive that they operated in UDMA mode-will double check later this evening. The other intersting thing is that the drive worked perfectly the first time in my father's computer when i put it in. so it can't be the drive. aside from updating the bios i also foudn an update for the VIA ide drivers as well and installed that. I'm at a complete loss now. I mean i suppose it isn't the biggest deal in the world to run the drive in PIO mode but i'd like to get maximum performance out of it. As far as i can see, it all points to an IDE controller issue but like i said, the harddrive runs in UDMA mode wihtout a problem on both chains. I've tried using it as a standalone on both chains as well thinking maybe it had a hardware conflict with the other dvd drive. i'm pretty much all out of ideas. anyone have any suggestions??

As for specs:
W.D 80gig hd
optorite dd0201 dvd writer
amd athlon xp on a syntax sv266ad board
windows xp
ati radeon all in wonder card
creative soundblaster live 5.1 gamer
firewire card

(board and processor are about 2 months old, ram is fairly new as well)

any help would be greatly appreciated
512mb ddr ram pc2100