Drive cabling question

[maximumbob]

xp service pack 2, 2 hard drives, 1 cd writer, 1 dvd writer. I am having cd and dvd writing issues and am wondering if there is any agreement on cabling the drives together. Currently 2 hdd's on primary IDE jumpered as master-slave, 1 dvd-rw and 1 cdrw on secondary IDE port as master-slave. I have read that hdd's should be together and that they should be separated. Any consensus? Thanks in advance.

 

[mpilchfamily]

Doesn't matter but things tend to run better if the HDDs are on a seperate cable from the optical drives.

 

[Billb2]

No, not necessarily. You want to have the drives you are copying from/to on separate chanels, so that reads are on one chanel and writes on the other.

Also check Device Manager > IDE Controllers > Channel(s) > Properties >Advanced Settings to make sure the correct DMA is enabled.

 

[maximumbob]

still 50-50, anybody else?

 

[Slatz]

The issues you are having are rather vague, what issues? Billb2 is bang on as far as advice for cabling goes.

 

[maximumbob]

drives wouldn't write, wouldn't open, looked like it was writing but nothing readable on the disk. I don't use it that much so I can't pinpoint when it started. Programs are Nero Essentials and CdburnerXp. I removed one optical drive from the cable and the other started working. I just wondered if I had inadvertently messed up the cabling.