Hi, this problem has been occuring for the past few months and I hope one of you can point me in the right direction.

My problem is that my DVD Writer sometimes crashes mid-way through burning a disc. The crash doesn't always happen (around 65% of burns), seems to happen at random times during the burns and the crash is completely catastrophic: the whole system powers down without warning.
What is really odd is that sometimes the system won't power back up after the crash unless I turn the system off AT THE SOCKET and leave it for a few seconds.

The drive is a Pioneer DVR-111D running the latest firmware under Windows XP SP 2. I use Nero 6 to burn my discs. The motherboard is an MSI K9N SLI Platinum (Nforce 570 chipset), and the drive is running off the boards only IDE channel as master with no slave.

I've tried looking for reports of similar problems without any success. If anyone here could suggest any potential solutions it would be much appreciated.

remove the nforce drivers and delete the ide channel.  Now reboot and let windows install the microsoft drivers for the ide drive.  This should resolve your problem.

(in reply to Herald)

You should also check , if your PSU haves any problems .  

Looks as a hardware problem to me ... so PSU and memory modules , are the most known issues.

(in reply to MP3Mogul)

I agree with overvolt.  I have nearly the same hardware setup as Herald (MSI K9N mobo, Pioneer DVR-111D) but i'm running 64bit Win Vista Ultimate.  I recently upgraded my PC from an AMD 3800 to an AMD 6000 and just discovered the wattage difference between the two.  The 3800 used somewhere in the neighborhood of 89 Watts while the new 6000 uses over 125 Watts.  My system runs flawlessly until I attempt to burn a CD/DVD.  Once I start the burn the system will shut down without warning and will sometimes enter a state where I have to unplug the power cord to get it to reboot.  I'm going to do some investigation today to see if I can remove my other DVD drive and secondary hard drive to eliminate some power consumption.  If I can successfully run a burn then I know it is time to upgrade my power supply.

(in reply to overvolt)