Optical Drive Peculiarity

[Tinkerer]

Can anyone suggest why this is happening. With a friend we recently built
a PC which has a Gigabyte Mobo with 4 SATA connections, 1 IDE and 4GB of
RAM. Two optical drives from his previous PC were installed on the IDE
connection. One was a CD-RW and the other was a DVD-RW. The DVD-RW drive
would not recognise recordable CDs, only DVDs although the CD-RW drive
worked fine. He assumed that the DVD-RW drive, which was elderly, was
faulty and replaced it with a new SATA DVD-RW drive. The same symptoms
were still present i.e. CD-RW drive worked fine but the new DVD-RW drive
would not recognise recordable CDs, only DVDs. On a whim he disconnected
the CD-RW drive and immediately the DVD-RW recognised, and recorded to,
recordable CDs. Is there something in the motherboard, or Windows XP, that
would cause this effect when two recordable drives are present? It seems
very odd.

 

[John McGaw]

Can anyone suggest why this is happening. With a friend we recently built
a PC which has a Gigabyte Mobo with 4 SATA connections, 1 IDE and 4GB of
RAM. Two optical drives from his previous PC were installed on the IDE
connection. One was a CD-RW and the other was a DVD-RW. The DVD-RW drive
would not recognise recordable CDs, only DVDs although the CD-RW drive
worked fine. He assumed that the DVD-RW drive, which was elderly, was
faulty and replaced it with a new SATA DVD-RW drive. The same symptoms
were still present i.e. CD-RW drive worked fine but the new DVD-RW drive
would not recognise recordable CDs, only DVDs. On a whim he disconnected
the CD-RW drive and immediately the DVD-RW recognised, and recorded to,
recordable CDs. Is there something in the motherboard, or Windows XP, that
would cause this effect when two recordable drives are present? It seems
very odd.

The first things that come to mind are the master/slave jumpers on the IDE
drives and the IDE cable itself -- is the cable "good" and is it connected
in the correct direction.

 

[Tinkerer]

I would guess that WinXP is considering only one drive the
default for burning CDs, but you could select which to use
with burning software if that software is sufficiently up to
date to recognize the capabilities of both drives.

I am glad to hear you say that because we have pretty well come to that
conclusion as well, it just seemed a bit unbelievable. For interest he has
Nero Burning Rom installed (version 6 I believe) and that simply says that
the DVD burner is not present but, like XP, happily works with the CD
burner. Also like XP, it is happy to use the DVD burner when the CD drive
is not present.

Many thanks.

 

[Tinkerer]

Then it is not what I was referring to. I was referring to
_ONLY_ when XP alone could not do it - which would be
unrelated to the ability of Nero to use either one, so long
as you selected which drive you wanted to use as the default
in Nero's menu.

He may well have not known how to configure it in Nero. Anyway, currently
we have switched the CD Writer for a straight DVD Reader and all seems now
to be working satisfactorily, he can read CDs and DVDs on both and write CDs
and DVDs on the writer. He is happy with it now so I will let sleeping
dogs lie. Thanks for the responses.