I recently formatted my HD and re-installed windows 98. I also installed my external cd-rw (HP 8200 series). My computer now crashes whenever I: -Try to play music cd's through my cd-rom drive -Try to copy cd's from my cd-rom drive to my cd-rw -Have a cd in my cd-rom drive and open up 'my computer' -Insert a cd in my cd-rom and let it autorun(I now have autorun switched off) Any help would be appreciated.

Have you looked in your device manager to see it their are any conflicts? You may want to check out your HP's site and see if this is a known problem. Also make sure you have the latest drivers. It seems to me that both drives may be trying to access the same IRQ's or DMA. Don't know though

Thanks for the help, I unchecked the DMA box in my cd-rom's settings and it appears to be working fine. Does anyone know how I could resolve the conflict and still have my cd-rom using DMA? Any suggestions or URL's would be greatly appreciated as I can't seem to find any relevant URL's.