CDRW troubleshooting tips by Sandra Underhill

I've got a question for Sandra Underhill.

In her article CDRW Troubleshooting - Part I - the second paragraph states: "I'm going to assume you have your CDRW drive correctly installed as a master drive in your system. "

My question: Why "master ", why not slave. I install over 200 CDRW's per year, plus other techies at our shop doing the same. And we NEVER install the CDRW as Master, unless the client does not have a CDROM or DVD.

Putting the CDRW as Master, ups it in the drive letter priority for WIndows. Meaning that you have to take the time to reset the drive letters. Or the client ends up with "drive not ready" messages whenever they "arrow down" the file tree and hit the CDRW before the CDROM/DVD that they wanted.

Other than this one question: her three part series was exactly on target and well written. Especially the part warning people not to use the CDRW as slave to the HDD. ... we find that to be a very common error.

Good work.

Ian Moran
www.allwebsales.be

 

Especially the part warning people not to use the CDRW as slave to the HDD

Why not ? My CDRW ( S: ) is slave to the HD on the Primary IDE controller and works just fine.

The CDROM ( T: ) is ( or was ) slave to the HD on the Secondary controller.

I have had no problems.

BillyBob

 

Well Billy Bob,

read Sandra's article and you'll see what she said.

But, the reason for not putting the CDRW on the same cable with your HDD, is that IDE cables default to the lowest common denominator.

That means that whatever standard your CDRW is, makes your HDD come down to that level.

In an extreme case you could have an ATA 133 HDD, running at PIO-4 standard.

You don't have "problems ", you just slow your system down a lot. No reason to slow down a HDD and your system. We spend lots of money to get the fastest results.

Put CDRW on the secondary IDE cable, along with your CDROM or DVD.

Take your 2nd HDD and put it on the same cable as your 1st HDD.
Your system will run quicker, file transfers will no longer be limited by the slow transfer protocol of the CDROM & CDRW

 

OK. I believe I understand correctly. It is not a matter of working or not working. It is a matter of speed with which I myself am not concerned.

I am more concerend about when I press a Mouse button or a key on the keyboard that this thing does what I tell it to and does not give me any argument about it. JUST DO IT

However I do understand that the system IN GENERAL will only work at the speed of the slowest component.

If you have one stick of PC133 RAM and one PC100 it may work but will only run at the speed of the PC100. At least I believe that is a fair compareison.

I also believe that you may be referring to the newer higher speed equipment. Both of my HDs are running ( acccording to the BIOS ) LBA UDMA 33. So I don't think the CDRW is going to slow them down very much. In fact the HDs may be slowing it down if I understand you correctly.

Also the Motherboard and its capabilities play a large part in all of this. So that brings us right back to the fact of my old standby comment.

" The combination of componets quite often dictates how things get set up so that they work properly. "

That is why my CDRW is slave to the Primary HD cause that is where it seems to WORK the best.

BillyBob