hi

this is what I have

Primary Master: HDD
Secondary Master: CD-ROM
Secondary Slave: CD-RW

When I use Nero's 'on-the-fly' for copying CD to CD it gives me a warning that 'buffer under run' could accour cause of my hardware order.

So, what would be the best arrangement, and why?

Have you had a buffer problem? Probably not I see nothing wrong with your hardware order. I have mine set the same way. I can't imagine a better configuration.

Just for the heck of it, why not switch the master/slave settings on your CD-ROM and CD-RW and see what happens? It can't hurt anything. If that doesn't work try putting the CD-ROM as your Primary Slave and the CD-RW as Secondary Master. As a rule, you should keep CD devices on a separate IDE channel from your HDD, but you could do that temporarily to troubleshoot your problem.

Looks good except that maybe the secondary master cd is old and won't keep up with the cd/rw.

Ideally, from a CD burner point of view, you don't want the source CD rom drive and the CD Recorder to be on the same BUS channel.

Most folks like hanging both CD rom drives on the same BUS because it won't slow down the hard drive, because hard drive access times and speed are much fatser than CD rom drives.

So it's a double edged sword, You can try slowing the burn rate down to 4x or even 2 x. This may help.

Joe

Joe is right....if going disk to disk should always be on separate IDE channels...but for good quality burning...i usually copy cd to hard drive first then burn that image...then its full proof...don't burn coasters that way..cause if didnt get an error copying to HD then image has to be good.(to do image to drive first use burner rom to do the copying)

Good luck

Beaner

That 'Slowing down the hard drive by putting the cdrom on the same controller' is an 'Old Husbands Tale'. Change your configuration to this:

Primary Master: HDD
Primary Slave: CD-ROM
Secondary Master or Slave: CD-RW

This will speed up HD or CD-ROM to CD-RW writes.
It will slow down CD-ROM to HD writes.

The 'max' makes a lot of sense to me, but what if I do this:

primary master: HDD
secondary master: cable-select (CD-ROM)
secondary slave: cable-select (CD-RW)

won't this speed up copying to all possible combinations? But who determines which setting to chose when a device is on 'cable-select'???

No Danty, its just the same as your original config. The problem here is that you have only two ide channels, ide1 and ide2. Each one can have up to 2 devices on it but only one device per channel may be accessed at one time. On the fly copiying from one cdrom to the other when both are on the same channel can cause problems because they have to take turns sending and recieving data. High speed burns easily fail under this arrangement. If you put the drives on separate channels they can freely send and recieve data and you should get a successful burn. This is also the reason it is often recommended that you don't use your computer while it is burning because HDD activity can interfere with the performace of a cd drive on hte same channel.

I recommend you use max's suggested setup above.

Mark, good explanation, and I whole-heartedly agree.

Dave

I fixed my problems by getting a CD cooker with BURN protection.. Works like a dream...

(~QQ~)