Samsung CD burner conflicting with Pioneer DVD burner
 

Last week my dad bought a Pioneer DVD writer (Pioneer DVR AO8XLA) to put in his computer (1.6GHz, Windows XP Pro, 256MB RAM). He has two hard disks on IDE1 on the same ribbon cable, and on IDE2, same ribbon, are the Pioneer DVD and a Samsung writer (both are rewritable). The DVD is master and the CD is the slave and the BIOS has everything in check, everything's fine.

The two writers are conflicting though. When one is unplugged the other works fine on its own. But when both are plugged in and Windows recognizes them as Samsung and Pioneer drives they don't work anymore. When you play an audio CD the sound constantly skips in both drives, and when he puts a data DVD in the drive it takes minutes to read any files and usually only displays the autorun.ini file (only a few KB), but sometimes displays a few more files (like an .ico and a couple of others), everything is incredibly slow and all the files shown are only KBs in size, nothing over 500kb or so. It's a DVD full of video-editing software so the disc isn't faulty, and when the Samsung CD writer is unplugged the DVD works perfectly.

So when only one is plugged in it works fine, but when both are in the music skips, reading files is incredibly slow and the DVD only displays files that are a few KBs in size.

I've looked around for known conflicts with these drives but can't seem to find anything, can anyone help me out?

I've had a samsung cd burner (48x) and my current pioneer DVR-106, and had zero problems with them.

Perhaps it's a windows problem. You could try manually removing the drives from Windows' device manager. Windows will then put them back, maybe solving underlying problems (such as DMA not working). Of course, you could also try swapping one harddisk with one of the drives; see if putting them on different IDE cables solves the problem.

Finally, you could simply kick out the samsung, because the pioneer has pretty much the same options (and more), and should be almost as fast.

The Pioneer's got CD writing capabilities and all that jazz, he kept the Samsung in there partly because it's got nowhere else to go, and partly because it helps in duplicating a CD, just makes things easier.

I'll do some switching with the cables and see if I can narrow it down to a faulty cable perhaps, and I've uninstalled them in Windows and reinstalled them again but no luck. I've also tried them with different master/slave settings, new IDE ribbons, putting them in different IDE slots on the motherboard, etc. The next step is a format and reinstall of Windows I think, it never hurts to have a nice clean install for this sort of thing.

Cheers for the help, I'll try swapping the hard disks too!

I would try a bios update, who knows maybe the computer just doesnt' like that combination

alternatively, if all else fails, you could try a promise pci IDE controller. That gives you two extra IDE connectors, a seperate BIOS for those drives, and the option of putting both writers as single drive/master on their own cables.

Thanks for the help guys, it turned out to be a ribbon cable problem, even though we tried three different cables. He bought an extra long IDE cable because it was a bit of a squeeze with all the wires and now they seem to both be working. Strange how all of our ribbons seemed to be faulty, or somehow the wrong type maybe? Anyway, thanks for the help!