HP CD-RW problems

[stevet]

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

[Jim P]

Make sure he disables any TSR's, virus scans,
fax software etc. while he is recording. I was having a problem like you mentioned but as soon as I disabled the above the problems were gone.

[H-Bomber]

I had similiar problems with my CDR and buffer underrun errors with adaptec easy cd creator. Basically the data is not getting from the hdd to the CDR fast enough. What my home setup is:
2.1 GB Fujitsu <- Primary Master
Kodak CDR <- Primary Slave
6.4 GB Fujitsu <- Secondary Master
Teac 32x CDROM <- Secondary Slave
I have found this setup to work fine since I have the 2.1 GB drive partitioned in half, 1B for Win 98 and 1GB for CD Writing. Running them off the same IDE cable seems to have fixed my problem. Certain setups with IDE devices just dont work properly. Jim P is also right in saying you shouldnt be running any other software in the background, but with the setup I use I have virus programs running plus other things in the system tray (about 2-3 things) and since changing my setup have not wasted any CD's (Maybe one, but that was a user error
Just a quick note, I had these problems while I was using my CDR with my 686 200 MX running with an SP-97v Motherboard, until I played around with IDE settings for drives, then it seemed ok. Hope this will help keep your customer happy.

[ellingtond]

I have seen this problem several times:

I don't know if this is what H-Bomber was trying to say, but when running IDE CDRs you need to put your HD and regular CD rom on the Primary IDE and the CDR on the secondary IDE by itself. If you have an second HD or a Zip drive slave them with the CDR UNLESS you plan to make your burns off the second HD.

In short, the source and destinations drives need to be on separate IDE controllers. Keep the regular CD on a different channel from the CDR so you can make copies.

Source and destination on the same one causes the buffer underruns.

DE

[anon]

also go to hp web site and get new firmware