I spent several hours tearing my hair out last night before figuring
this out. Just bought a Plextor PX-708A DVD writer to replace my
venerable 12/32/10S. Up to this point my entire system had been all
SCSI. I uninstalled Easy CD Creator 5, plugged in the 708A as IDE
Primary master, and I was up. I installed the supplied Easy CD/DVD
Creator 6, things still looked fine. I tried burning a CD, it looked
very flaky as the buffer kept dropping to 0%, and CPU usage must have
been high as the system was extremely sluggish while burning.

I checked the device manager and found that the PX-708A appeared as a
"SCSI DVD ROM" device, and was not listed under the IDE section. I
have been running the Nvidia nForce2 2.03 drivers and hadn't had any
problems, but when I looked at the IDE section it just said "nForce
IDE controller" but did not list Primary or Secondary channels. Just
happens Nvidia has recently released 3.13 nForce2 drivers, so I
downloaded those and installed the complete set.

Disaster - all of sudden my system (which has been rock stable all
year) started getting blue screen "STOP IRQL_LESS THAN" errors and
rebooting, mainly when accessing the DVD drive but also randomly
otherwise. I tried the older Asus version 1.16 nForce2 drivers, same
problem. Tried the default WinXP IDE drivers, same problem. I tried
uninstalling Easy CD/DVD but kept blue screening before it was
completely uninstalled. Luckily I had ghosted my system drive before
this so I reverted to that image.

Finally I figured out that I couldn't install the "Drag to CD" portion
of Easy CD/DVD Creator, which was somehow conflicting with the nForce2
IDE drivers. I changed the nForce2 IDE driver to the Asus 1.16 version
(which also correctly identifies the DVD on the primary IDE channel),
installed Easy CD without the drag to CD option, and everything was
happy after that. Burning/buffer is now fine and the system isn't
sluggish.

I guess the buggy nforce 2.03 drivers actually worked by letting the
drive appear as a SCSI device somehow. I remember that Roxio had the
same problem with the Direct CD portion of Easy CD Creator 5 (blue
screens) and there were patches to address it. I'm surprised that it's
happened again with 6, and just wanted to share this if anyone else is
having this problem.

I'm definitely going to give Nero a try now.

-Art

Art wrote:

> I spent several hours tearing my hair out last night before figuring
> this out. Just bought a Plextor PX-708A DVD writer to replace my
> venerable 12/32/10S. Up to this point my entire system had been all
> SCSI. I uninstalled Easy CD Creator 5, plugged in the 708A as IDE
> Primary master, and I was up. I installed the supplied Easy CD/DVD
> Creator 6, things still looked fine. I tried burning a CD, it looked
> very flaky as the buffer kept dropping to 0%, and CPU usage must have
> been high as the system was extremely sluggish while burning.
>
> I checked the device manager and found that the PX-708A appeared as a
> "SCSI DVD ROM" device, and was not listed under the IDE section. I
> have been running the Nvidia nForce2 2.03 drivers and hadn't had any
> problems, but when I looked at the IDE section it just said "nForce
> IDE controller" but did not list Primary or Secondary channels. Just
> happens Nvidia has recently released 3.13 nForce2 drivers, so I
> downloaded those and installed the complete set.
>
> Disaster - all of sudden my system (which has been rock stable all
> year) started getting blue screen "STOP IRQL_LESS THAN" errors and
> rebooting, mainly when accessing the DVD drive but also randomly
> otherwise. I tried the older Asus version 1.16 nForce2 drivers, same
> problem. Tried the default WinXP IDE drivers, same problem. I tried
> uninstalling Easy CD/DVD but kept blue screening before it was
> completely uninstalled. Luckily I had ghosted my system drive before
> this so I reverted to that image.
>
> Finally I figured out that I couldn't install the "Drag to CD" portion
> of Easy CD/DVD Creator, which was somehow conflicting with the nForce2
> IDE drivers. I changed the nForce2 IDE driver to the Asus 1.16 version
> (which also correctly identifies the DVD on the primary IDE channel),
> installed Easy CD without the drag to CD option, and everything was
> happy after that. Burning/buffer is now fine and the system isn't
> sluggish.
>
> I guess the buggy nforce 2.03 drivers actually worked by letting the
> drive appear as a SCSI device somehow. I remember that Roxio had the
> same problem with the Direct CD portion of Easy CD Creator 5 (blue
> screens) and there were patches to address it. I'm surprised that it's
> happened again with 6, and just wanted to share this if anyone else is
> having this problem.

I've had nothing but problems with Adaptec/Roxio's UFS (aka Direct CD)
software since the initial release (3.5?) and gave up on it years ago. I
still use Easy CD Creator (just installed 6 recently) for most burning
tasks due to the straightforward interface and reliable results. CDFS is
the way to go IMHO.

> I'm definitely going to give Nero a try now.
>
> -Art

On Tue, 18 Nov 2003 12:59:13 -0800, Art wrote:

> I guess the buggy nforce 2.03 drivers actually worked by letting the
> drive appear as a SCSI device somehow. I remember that Roxio had the
> same problem with the Direct CD portion of Easy CD Creator 5 (blue
> screens) and there were patches to address it. I'm surprised that it's
> happened again with 6, and just wanted to share this if anyone else is
> having this problem.
>
> I'm definitely going to give Nero a try now.
>
> -Art

Roxio have a reputation going back many years for poor quality driver
integration.

Phuoc