"Edward Diener No Spam" wrote in
message ink.net...
I had never used a DVD Burner before, but decided to by an IDE one from
NewEgg. The DVD is the Samsung TS-H552U OEM version. I installed it on my
computer, an Abit At7, and the BIOS shows it. I booted into Win2k and I can
see it in the Device Manager fine. When I put in a CD or DVD I can read the
drive and see the contents in Explorer. So far, so good. I already checked
and I have the latest firmware for the drive.

I had bought along with the drive Samsung Pleomax DVD-RW 4x DVDs. The
drive specifically states that it supports DVD-RW(4x). I put one of the
disks in the drive and attempt to Burn some files on the DVD. I have never
done this before so assume it should be easy. I tried using two different
software programs for it but one completely hangs and hangs Win2k and the
other says it is copy the image to the DVD but nothing ever happens and
the progress bar stays at 0.

The first program I tried to use was Paragon ISO Burner. This program just
hangs once I get to the part where it attempts to read the blank DVD in
the drive in preparation for asking me what files I want to burn on the
DVD. After that I can not even open the drive case manually to take out
the drive, nor can I kill the software. I am able to shut down the system,
and then remove the DVD from the drive once I boot up.

The second program I tried was DeepBurner Free version. This gets to the
point where it says Creating CD image, then the Device Buffer progress bar
is filled, but nothing ever happens as far as Write Progress is concerned,
nor do I see the DVD light go on at any time. Here I can at least Cancel
and end the program, and then remove my DVD disk from the drive.

The only other possibility that something is wrong is that VIA has a VIA
Bus Master PCI IDE Utility which shows what drives are off of the two IDE
channels of my mobo. When I double-click on this utility in my system
tray, no drives are shown. Maybe this denoted some problem. But like I
said, when I look in the BIOS I can see my drives and Win2k pick them up.

The other possibility is that when I installed this DVD writer I did not
remove my previous DVD-ROM drive because I wanted to make sure this worked
first before I did. Is there a problem having more than one CD/DVD drive
under Win2k ? The software with which I tried to burn the DVD always
recognizes the particular Samsung drive, so I do not think it is getting
confused between my DVD drives.

I though using this drive would be easy, and am disappointed that it does
not work. I had previously bought two Samsung 160 GB hard drives and they
have worked flawlessly so far. Does any CD/DVD guru have any idea what is
going wrong here ?

Try running with only the DVD recorder connected. If that works, try running
with the DVD devices on seperate IDE controllers. You will find this
advantageous if you ever come to copying disks from the reader to the
writer.