Ok. I just purchased a Samsung TS-H542A DVD writer. I have this in an external enclosure, hooked up to my IBM laptop via a USB 2.0 pcmcia card. It came with Nero Express software. Everything works up to the point where it begans the burn, then the thing just hangs. On Nero, the recorder buffer level never goes above zero and the whole program freezes. Also, its seems that once it starts to hang, all activity in the drive stops - there are activity LED's on the enclosure and they stop lighting up once it hangs.

From this point, because the program is frozen, I have to end it via task manager. But then, the computer does not recognize my drive, I cannot do anything else and I have to reboot. Because of this, I cannot post any kind of error log because I cannot do anything.

I have tried installing the lastest firmware from samsung-odd, but I get an error saying that "flash Cmd failed". Incidentally, when this error pops up, the same things happens as described above - no activity on the drive, computer cannot recognize it any longer, computer freezes up.

One last thing. I have 2 IBM laptops, one for work and one at home. This does not work on either one of them. But I have a work collegue with a dell laptop and when we hook it up to his, the writer burns just fine. But we cannot see what is different about his than mine.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I am running XP, one computer has sp1 and the other sp2.

Thanks and let me know if you need more info,

Curtice