(Sigh) ok as the newbie here please forgive me if this has come up, but I've been through the forum for the last couple hours and have not seen anything like what I'm going through here.

Installed a Lite-On 812S, and a Promise Ultra 100 TX2 PCI/IDE control card today. The knuckleheads at newegg.com did not send me a driver disk for the promise card, and I found one on the co's website (Win9x-ME Promise Ultra100 TX2 [tm] IDE Controller (3-27-2003)).

I can't get Nero6 to recognize any burning media I insert in the drive. I assembled the data for a 4.5Gig data-disc in Nero to burn on a blank disc. I'm using Ridata 8x DVD-R, but also tried the enclosed LiteOn 8x DVD+R and the 4X DVD-R to see if my media was at fault. I get a "no disc inserted" from the nero info tool. "My Computer" does the same thing (drive not ready).

I upgraded firmware to version USOQ and tried again, same problem - "no disc inserted" on all media types.

My system is 750Mhz Athlon, 640Mb RAM, W98SE, ASPI 4.6, my motherboard's IDE-1 is running a primary and slave hard drive, IDE-2 with the 812S as master and CDROM as slave (yes I tried just running the 812S with no CDROM on the IDE channel). The promise card is running a single drive 60Gb Maxtor. I have one IDE slot open on the promise card.

812S is set for DMA support. Yes it's a 80 wire ribbon cable.

I've been messing with different things for about 6 hours now and I'm about at the end of my rope, I'm begininng to think I have a dead drive, but it will play data/music CD's. I installed powerDVD when I installed the drive this morning, and it was playing a Mr. Show DVD w/o any problems, but after I installed a trial version of Nero Burning Rom 6.3.1.17 Ultra Edition and flashed the firmware it wont recognize any DVDs for playing (it wont play, giving a "wrong format" error), nero's playback software wont load anything at all.

I am wasted from this experience and I'm hoping someone can offer me some advice.

I'm gonna sleep this one off for now and hope the good folks here can help me out. I'm pretty good with these machines and for the life of me cannot figure out what I'm doing wrong - should I have all my hard drives on the boards IDE channels and run the CDROM and 812S on the promise card?

Any help from the resident gurus is greatly appreciated. I am really intrigued that you can flash the firmware to make this drive work like an 832S with dual layer burning support - you guys are very savvy and I'm glad I found this online resource of information. I've downloaded files in anticipation of doing this if I an ever get this damn drive to work.

Lost in NJ. HELP! PLEASE!

From your words i understand that the drive won't read (Recognize) or burn any DVD+/-R or CD-R media, is that correct?

(in reply to zenbeer)

Yes you are correct. I cannot get the drive to recognize any blank media. Or read DVDs to play at this point.

(in reply to emperor)

Then possibly your drive is broke, i would suggest trying your drive in other PC (from a friend maybe?) to make sure nothing is wrong with your PC setup!

(in reply to zenbeer)

Believe it or not, the problem was NERO-6 itself. I uninstalled all the software I got byundled with the drive, and uninstalled the NERO-6 demo. Restarted, and reinstalled JUST NERO-6, and I was able to burn a DVD data disc. Weird! I had an older version of Nero (5) on my computer, it might have been something to do with that.

Thanks for listening - I'm sure I'll be panicking on here once I upgrade my firmware to the 832 specs. LOL... I really like the detailed posts and instructions on here.

(in reply to emperor)

I spoke too soon, this drive is shot. I'm returning it to newegg. It burned 2 discs, and 3 coasters. The discs that burned and showed data are not even showing up in the drive now after a reboot... POS garbage drive... I imagine it got smashed around in transit by FedEx (the box it was packaged in was pretty mangled when I got it).

(in reply to zenbeer)

yes that could be the problem, let us know when you got the replacement drive

(in reply to zenbeer)

It's beginning to look more like an upgrade issue to me or an IRQ conflict.

The discs that sucessfully burned that did not show up later in the day, were readable this morning. Tested the burner, and it made another at 8x with no problems.

I've been looking at my IRQ resources, and they are packed full:

While there are no stated conflicts in the device manager (IRQ steering
is on in windows), I did see multiple devices on IRQ channel 09, 10, 11,
and 15. 00-15 IRQ are filled.

09 - ACPI IRQ Holder for PCI IRQ Steering
09 - AMD 756 PCI to USB open host controller
09 - SCI IRQ used by ACPI bus
10 - Win9x-ME Promise Ultra100 TX2 IDE Controller (recently installed)
10 - Creative SB Live! Series
10 - Texas Instrumentss OHCI Compliant IEEE 1394 Host Controller
11 - ACPI IRQ Holder for PCI IRQ Steering
11 - ASUS AGP-V6600 SGRAM V 6.31c
14 - AMD 756 PCI Bus Master Dual IDE Controller
14 - Primary IDE Controller (dual fifo)
15 - AMD 756 PCI Bus Master Dual IDE Controller
15 - Secondary IDE Controller (dual fifo)

Think this has anything to do with my DVD problems before I return this sucker?

As well, I have DMA enabled for the CDROM and DVDRW on the MBs IDE-2, IRQ 14/15 are showing me (dual fifo) which I think means DMA is not enabled, right?

I think I've hit that "classic wall" people hit after 4-5 years, with the peripheral not wanting to work on the antiquated system and O/S. To be safe I'm pricing out some MB/Chip combos today - been putting this off for way too long I think.

(in reply to emperor)

The drive was not at fault, it was my cluttered W98SE operating system which was at least 4 years old. I removed my promise IDE card and pulled the 5 GB original 5400 RPM drive out of the system. Reformatted both slave drives (40 and 60GB maxtor 7200rpm) as NTFS and installed Windows Xp professional.

The drive works fine now, and the system drivers, motherboard drivers, and BIOS were all updated. No problems here now. ;)

zen

(in reply to emperor)

thanks for the news update

(in reply to zenbeer)