Help solve this mystery!

[trekkerj]

I thought I was having some problems with my Panasonic LFD311. Discs were getting messed up toward the end. I exchanged the drive with a friend's Pioneer 103 which he knew to be working perfectly. I installed this into my machine, and some of the dvdr's he was using in the drive suddenly weren't being recognized. That's weird item #1. Second, I tried burning onto a different brand of disc that it did recognize, but I still had the same problems on all my DVD players. What, in my system, would cause this problem regardless of the drive I am using. Here is my configuration:

Win XP Pro
Pent IV 1.5
512 Ram

IDE1 Master 20gig Maxtor
IDE1 Slave 20gig WD
IDE2 Master The DVD burner
IDE2 Slave HP CDRW drive

IDE3 Master 120gig WD 7200 rpm (this is where I am burning FROM, and it is connected to a third party Ultra ATA/133 controller card. Can this be the problem? The drive is fast enough, but can the card be causing data transfer problems?

[thxtof]

The Brand or probably the Non-brand of your DVD-R is probably the pb.

If your burned DVD-Rs skip and freeze around the end, but you did not get any errors at burning time (are you using Nero ?), I would say 90% of the chances are that you're using a bad/cheap DVD-R (like Vivastar).

[trekkerj]

However, when I put the drive back in, I still find strange occurences. When I do a warm reboot, I get a BIOS message stating that no HD can be found on Primary IDE 0, Primary IDE 1, Secondary IDE 0, or Secondary IDE 1. Cold shutdown fixes this. Would this be a power issue?

[Ber60]

You have to listen to your HD's if its a power issue you will hear them spin-down a little bit

[jacobjef]

Trekkjer,

I was loking thru postings because i also have the panasonic dvd writer. I had problems similar to the ones that you mention, and I also run a similar set-up (with win xp, etc). I just removed the HP cd-writer and it solved a lot of my problems, even though device manager never saw a problem.

[trekkerj]

Switching from DMA to PIO mode on the Panasonic seems to have solved the problem with playback toward the end of the disc. I also replaced the IDE ribbon cable.