I have both a DVD drive and CDRW drive running in XP professional, the problem is that both drives sort of only half work, they read cds but freeze up the OS when you try and running stuff off the disks and get I/O errors, when playing DVD's the video skips every 5 seconds. Previously on beofre upgrading my mobo and OS they worked fine. I am sure I have installed all the drivers and even tried changing the IDE cables. The problem could be something to do with my Master slave set up, i noticed in my bios that both my harddrives are set to primary and both CD drives are set to seconndary and writer is set to master, is this the right set up to have. Any advive and help would be greatly recived Thanks in anticipation Rich Systems spec. 2000+ xp athlon 512 ram MSI KM2M Combo-L SKT A KM266 64mb siluro graphics 40 gb maxtor 80gb maxtor DVD pioneer CDRW sony OS - winxp pro

I would check to see if DMA and UDMA is enabled. Clyde

primary master - HDD w/OS primary slave - DVD 2ndary master - CDRW 2ndary slave - 2nd HDD

Primary-Master HDD (OS) Primary-Slave 2nd HDD Secondary-Master CDRW Secondary-Slave DVD ROM Always connect HDDs to Primary if possible! The XP default burning software is Roxio and you may have inadvertantly uninstalled these drivers or part there of. The other problem may be conflict from the different burning software that you have installed, particularly if you had/have them installed at the same time.

"Always connect HDDs to Primary if possible!" Sorry Matthew, that's bad advice. Data transfers are much more efficient across channels rather than between two devices sharing the same channel/cable. If you copy from CD/DVD drive to burner while both share the same cable, only one device can do it's thing at a time...one has to complete it's business before the other one can begin. But when each device is on a separate channel, they can both work similtaneously And in these days of "independent timing", different speed devices (ATA33 & ATA100, for instance) can peacefully coexist on the same channel & still run at their respective speeds without affecting the speed of the other.

With XP you need to make sure that the primary and secondary controllers are set correctly. I run a number of systems with both optical drives on the secondary controller and have no problems. Check the hardware settings in the Device Manager/Secondary IDE Channel Properties/Advanced tab. Make sure they are both set to DMA mode and not PIO only. I have gone onsite to repair a PC and found the problem was the DMA settings being incorrect. Once set I have not seen any problem in playing audio or DVD movies with the system. Richard

Thanks guys for the advice i'll try some of those ideas