HP CD-R problems

Hi there Techheads... I installed a CD-RW for a customer for his home computer, but he is having problems. His hardware setup is:

Asus SP-97v motherboard
32 MB EDO RAM
3.2 GB Fujitsu HD - primary master
24x Sanyo IDE CD-drive - primary slave
2x2x24 HP IDE CD-RW drive (7550i) - secondary master

He is using the software that came with the drive - Adaptec Easy CD Creator and DirectCD. He is haing some trouble with buffer underruns and other problems with recording. He brought it in to the shop on Saturday and I walked him through some basics. We tried slowing the recording speed from 2x to 1x, which seemed to work. But he emailed today saying that he is still having trouble. And I get the impression that he is running out of patience.

I know that there have been a lot of posts regarding CD-R problems, but would you experts out there mind repeating some of your tips and tricks?

Thanks in advance for the dozens of replies. ;-)

Steve

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Altoplanos Information Systems, Inc.
Coeur d'Alene, Idaho USA
www.altoplanos.net

not sure about the hp but this config is preferred for all the philips' i installed so you may want to give it a try. move the sanyo to the secondary master then install the burner as the secondary slave, could be a sync problem between the two in the present configurarion.

also for big burn jobs on the advanced tab on the adaptec software try enabling "buffering to the harddrive".

hope this helps...

I just installed on onto a NT 4 SP4 machine. Had some problems so part may help. Insure DMA disabled on EIDE channel he CDRW is on. I had problems with the enclosed software also. Removed it and used an older copy of EZ CD Creator to install then loaded the patches to 3.1C from the Adaptec website. Don't know why the shrinkwrap package didn't work but it seems to be working fine now. Hope it helps.

You don't mention whether the buffer underruns come from cd-cd copy or hd-cd burns.

I own and older version of the same burner and have very good success with it because I understand the limitations.

With so little ram, (you mention 32 meg) there is no room for applications to get out of the swap file. This is going to work the controller on that motherboard unless the user just leaves it idle while burning.

I would inquire to what activities are going on while burning. I can only do light work on my PC and make sure that hard drive access is kept to a minimum while burning. This leaves the controller free and open for the burner to get what it needs to keep the buffer full.

I hope that this helps, and good luck.