During the last month or two my Acer cd/rw and hdd have been working in unison to cause my pc to lock up. The green read light and the red write light on the cd/rw will both be blinking at the same time, with no cd in the drive. I can also hear a clicking noise coming from the cd/wr that wasn't there before.Then the hdd will start to join in and blink as well with the lights on the cd/rw. After just a few seconds of these lights blinking my cursor will cease to move and my pc will lock up. I tried using control+al+delete to shut down any "not responding" programs but that doesn't work. I also flashed my drive with the latest version of firmware to no avail. I checked the secondary IDE cable and reseated it along with the jumper in the slave postion on the cd/rw. All these have failed to solve the problem. Only thing that has worked so far is to disonnect power and IDE cable from cd/rw. Oh I have also tried removing drive from hardware manager and reinstalling it from scratch but that didn't work either. Could this be software related? Is this the result of a virus? I am stumped. Thank you for helping. Darren

Hi Darren Try installing this way... 1. Hard drive on ide 1 2. cd-rw master, cd-rom slave, on ide 2 post back Peace beansoup

In Device manager: Any question marks in CD-Rom? Check if the devices in question, are working properly, and there are no conflicts..Disable one device at a time, and check if the other is working properly..Visa-versa... Also double check that the cables and jumpers are set right... If none of the above works, uninstall the CD-RW, and try reinstalling it... Peace beansoup