Problems with CD-RW

  • Thread starter Thread starter Mike
  • Start date Start date
M

Mike

I have an eMachines T2200 and it came with a Samsung CD-
R/RW SW-240B. Although the XP "write files to this CD"
utility seems to complete correctly when I burn files to
a CD, it seems I can never see the contents of these CD's
when I place them back in the drive at a later time. In
fact XP seems to slow a bit or hang for a few seconds
when I put burned CD's back in the drive, and then
ultimately comes back with a "0 objects" status for the
CD. A lot of times XP doesn't even recognize that there
is a CD in the drive if the CD has been written to
previously. I know there are files on these disks because
I burned them previously. For a period of time I tried
using Nero to format and burn CD's and had the same
problems - couldn't recognize CD's in the drive and I
couldn't see burned files. Any ideas or advice would be
greatly appreciated.
 
Do you get any error messages in Event Viewer? You can
check by going to Control Panel, open Administrative
Tools, and then Event Viewer. This sounds kind of like my
problem - wish I had a solution as well :).

Jack
 
The solution that worked for my system was to set the
transfer mode of my CD device to PIO only.

You do this by opening the Control Panel, opening the
System icon, go to the Hardware tab, and clicking
the "Device Manager" button.
Go to the IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers node and expand it.
Right click and select properties on the channel you CD
resides on (for me it was the "Secondary IDE Channel").
Go to the Advanced Settings tab
Change the device (device 0 for me) giving you problems
to Transfer Mode = "PIO Only".

Hopes this helps others,
Jack

P.S., anyone know what the downside is to PIO only? Or
why "DMA if available" didn't automatically degrade to
PIO if DMA wasn't working? I ran Dell Diagnositics and it
didn't find anything wrong with DMA.
 
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