Having just purchased some more blank cd's I popped one into my drive only to find that my CD-R drive couldn't read them. I thought it was the cd's at first but I tried it with some other blank ones and finally a couple of game cd's which my other cd drive (just normal not writer) read fine. I assumed it was therefore the drive not the cd's.

After a couple of restarts I managed to get it to accept the existence of a blank cd if it were in the drive before the computer booted up (i.e. put the cd in then restart). However this was still only working about 50% of the time and if I wanted to change cd's then it wouldn't read them.

When I finally got it to read one and attempted to burn onto it It got about 3% of the way into it then seemed to 'stall' and after a few minutes gave me an SCSI error and stopped. I tried it twice and got an error both times.

My friend said that SCSI is a different sort of connection, like not IDE. My CD-R is IDE and according to control panel> system > view by connection> is connected through the 'Secondary IDE Contoller' along with my other CD drive (which works perfectly).

Anyone got any ideas of things to try?

[ October 05, 2004, 21:23: Message edited by: Lazy Bonzo ]

SCSI is a different interface, I have no idea why you'd get SCSI errors with an IDE drive...

What company makes the drive? I'd try contacting them or checking out their website.

It's an MSI drive.

[ October 06, 2004, 20:31: Message edited by: Lazy Bonzo ]

Lazy, that can be a number of issues. I'm not sure about the "Small Computer System Interface" error, though. I know that most addon IDE cards, and onboard RAID controllers, are detected by Windows as a SCSI device; they do this for a couple of reasons, but Command Queueing isn't supported by the IDE standard. It sounds like you've got both those drives running on the onboard controller.

Anyways, some drives are very finicky about media. I'd expect that MSI to be a rebadged Liteon, or some other primary manufacturer. MSI doesn't make their own drives, you see, so you might want to check for a firmware update for that model.

It can be a bad IDE cable. It can be a driver conflict, or an IRQ conflict. Some drives also will cause funky errors like that if they are slaved on the secondary channel; there have been drives in the past that absolutely would not work as anything but the master-only on the secondary channel; meaning, no other drives hooked up to that channel.

It can also be the drive itself, which means a swap-out.

You're going to have to give me a model number of the drive, and the mainboard, before it can be narrowed down. If you've never updated the firmware, you likely need to do that as well. And might as well tell me the brand of media and where you bought it, along with it's rated speed and the color of the write-side (green, dark blue, light blue, gold or sliver)

Mainboard model number is K7VMA
CDRW is set to secondary master and the model is MS-8340A (http://www.msicomputer.com/product/p_spec.asp?model=CR52-A2&class=osd); bought from here (http://www.savastore.com/include2/info7.asp?catalog%5Fname=Savastore&product%5Fid=10263477&pid=44).

The cd's that worked for a while but now the drive won't read are: MMORE with a rated speed of 'multi speed', the write side is dark blue. Bought from Savastore (http://www.savastore.com/products/product.asp?catalog%5Fname=Savastore&product%5Fid=10252844&pid=44).

The cd's that it hasn't read at all were these (http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0002MNYPO/026-6483725-2692468) from Amazon(uk). They are rates as 'Up to 52X' speed. The write side is light blue.

I have tried several game and music cd's in the drive, none of which it will read.

I am running on Windows 98SE. I have updated from firmware version 150 to 161 but it has not solved the problem.

[edit] I have tried unplugging the normal cd drive so that my writer is the secondary master on it's own. It now reads normal cd's (after a long reading time) and some cd-r's (The MMORE's). However it still gets stuck at about 3% of the writing process and gives me an SCSI/ATAPI command timeout error.

[Edit] I thought I had managed to write one of the MMORE cd's but, though the files show up they each seem to be corrupt or (in the case of sound files) only the first few seconds and then it crashes. My cd-drive still won't read the BenQ cd's.
However I took one (of the BenQ's) round to my friends and they were not only detected but wrote perfectly.

I am coming to the conclusion that it's either Win98 or my actual drive that is messing everything up.

[ October 18, 2004, 19:41: Message edited by: Lazy Bonzo ]