Bit of a continuation from a previous post, sorry.... I've a computer, a BIOSTAR M7NCG 400, in it it has... 1 80gig hd 1 DVD ROM set to master 1 CDRW set to slave (both dvd and cd on same IDE) as well as a modem and various other components... (256Megs of PC2100 RAM from crucial, running an applebred Duron) now, problem: CDRW never seems to work, get an error along the lines of "couldn't perform operation x"... I've tried it in Nero, Instant CD from Pinnacle, and WinXP integrated, all with varying forms of failure... with Instant CD, if i did a CD copy, it'd say it ran into an error, and ask if I'd want to retry, clicked yes once or twice, and to my astonishment, it went through burning the disc... this was on a MAD DOG Dominator 3 CD RW, I have an older CD-RW, not sure of make, but came with an HP... worked the first time that i put it in without much trouble/problem... never again to the best of my knowledge... I thought it had went out, but, when i brought it home and put it in a different computer, it burnt a cd straight off, worked fine... my question, more or less, is, barring the idea that the CDRWs might be defective, what could be wrong? I've had no other problems with the computer, so i wouldn't think it'd be something along the lines of memmory, or anything of that level, and, while the PSU came with the case, I think it has enough power for what's requested of it... Could it be the motherboard? if so would it/could it be cleared up by a simple bios update? *im a bit desperate as Im rather clueless at the momment*

First of all. there can be issues with two optical drives on the same IDE channel. I am currently doing just that sucessfully. Matter of fact I have three optical drives and one HD partitioned. Check the jumpers on all drives to be sure that all are configured correctly. Use master and slave, not CS. If you are using an 80 wire IDE cable be sure the master is on the black end, slave on grey middle and blue to MB. When first setting up I had problems getting the BIOS to see all the drives and ID them properly. Enter your BIOS and set all drives to auto. Then hit F3 to autodetect all drives. This should relult in all drives being identified by model number. If this doesn't happen with all the drives you may want to reconfigure the drive arrangement. Verify that you have PnP aware OS enabled in the BIOS. Also make sure that both IDE channels are enabled in the BIOS and that your harddrive controllers in windows show a primary, secondary and dual controller. The dual controller should have the chipset brand as part of the name.

all Jumpers are correct.. first thing I checked... all drives show up in BIOS as well... cable is in correct config...

What about the controllers in device manager?

Some interesting reading at these sites, may shed some light on the problem. http://users.tpg.com.au/bzyhjr/cdr_cdrw.html#h http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=321641 http://www.dvdrbase.com/archive/index.php/t-32197 Hope this will help.