DVD drive restarts pc

[holidaychicken]

Hi, i am a bit of a novice when it comes to this so apologise in advance.

i have puchased a new DVD drive as my old dvd rom restarted my pc whenever i tried to use it which i thought was down to a faulty drive. i replaced with a dvd r/w from LG and have already got an LG dvd r/w drive in my system.

my problem is that if i insert a cd or dvd disk in the new drive it almost immediately resatrts my pc.

i have found this problem loads of times when searching the net and also a cople of links in these forums but nothing seems to resolve it.

i have unistalled both drives in hardware manager, unistalled any dvd related software and reinstalled and nothing seems to cure it

hope someone can help as i am going nuts

if it helps the boot drive is the 70gb raptor on SATA cable, the 250 gb is on one of the ide cables alone set to master and the two dvd drives are on the other ide cable, the problem drive is on the middle connector set to slave and the other dvd drive which works fine is on the end connector set to master.

cheers

Andy

Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition
Service Pack 2
4.09.00.0904 (DirectX 9.0c)

AMD Athlon 64, 2600 MHz (11 x 236)
Motherboard Chipset nVIDIA nForce3 250, AMD Hammer
System Memory 2048 MB (PC3200 DDR SDRAM)
BIOS Type Award (07/11/05)

Display:
Video Adapter RADEON X800 XT Platinum Edition S

Storage:
IDE Controller NVIDIA nForce3 250 Parallel ATA

Controller (v2.6)
IDE Controller NVIDIA nForce3 250 Serial ATA

Controller (v2.6)
Floppy Drive Floppy disk drive
Disk Drive WDC WD2500JB-00REA0 (232 GB, IDE)
Disk Drive WDC WD740ADFD-00NLR1 (69 GB, IDE)
Optical Drive HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GSA-H12N
Optical Drive HL-DT-ST DVD-RAM GSA-H55L - PROBLEM DRIVE
SMART Hard Disks Status OK

[EzyStvy]

Is your pc randomly rebooting itself? You can go to

Control Panel->System icon->Advance tab->Startup & Recovery Settings button. UNcheck/disable the "auto reboot" option. Instead of rebooting you'll probably get a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) which can be searched on for a solution.

You can go to http://support.microsoft.com/search/?adv=1 to search on for example: STOP 0x00000050

[alanebro82]

You might check your power supply too. DVD drives don't pull a ton of current, but if it did happen to load down your power supply, your computer would most likely reboot itself in a similar manner.

edit: Also, while they don't use very much 'average power', a large amount of current is needed to get the DVD to start spinning. The initial torque required causes the first quarter-second or so draw a lot more current than it does any other time in operation.

[Cricket]

Did you try replacing the IDE cable?

Cricket

[holidaychicken]

thanks guys for the replys, i have tried a different cable and i think the power supply is good as the other drive runs fine, i havent tried to force a bsod yet as when i was researching the problem on the net some people have had a situation where the pc wouldnt boot at all afterwards.
i have found loads of references to the same problem on the net and everyone has suggested the psu and cable and drivers and reinstalling the drivers and evnetually the OS. it seems to be some sort of conflict between the two dvd drives, and some of the software.

i have managed to get the drive to play dvds and also nearlly burnt a cd but it restarted when it went to verify the data. the other thing it really doesnt seem to like is installing programs off a cd, it starts off and then restarts. really odd and frustrating.

i might try the disable restart and see what i get.

thanks very much for your answers, anything else would be much appreciated

andy

[glc]

the 250 gb is on one of the ide cables alone set to master

Disk Drive WDC WD2500JB-00REA0 (232 GB, IDE)

Can't do that. Standalone WD's need to be set to Cable Select or the jumper must be removed. Master with WD's must have a slave present.

Try moving the 3 IDE devices around to different channels and positions.

[holidaychicken]

thanks glc i will give that a go, the hard drive is new as well, it did come with jumper set to CS and i changed to master, as seeing as i know next to nothing about pc's it seemed like a good idea.

do you think it would be better to have one dvd drive and the 250gb hard drive on one cable and the other dvd drive on its own. also if i set and ide drive to master, on one of the ide cables, does that apply to the other cable as well, ie should they be set to slave/cs.

hope thst makes sense

thanks very much

andy

[glc]

If you are using 80 wire Ultra ATA cables on both IDE channels (which you should be), you can set all drives to CS. Master goes on the end, slave in the middle. Make sure the correct end is on the motherboard, it will be the end that is *NOT* black.

Experiment with placements and combinations, it can't hurt.

[holidaychicken]

thanks glc, i am s bit of a numpty, if i set all drives to CS when you say the master goes on the end and slave in the middle, what does that mean, as i thought the jumper determined if it was master or slave, apologies if anything mis spelt as i now have a migraine from sitting infront of the bloomin thing so long

i have had some success and have managed to burn my music that i bought from hmv using mindows media player, nero just says i dont have enough licenses or something, and both drives appear to play dvds at the mo using power dvd

i am beginning to think this may be a nero thing!

i have changed jumper on 250gb drive to cs and is on secondary ide and moved and renamed my new faster optical drive to master on end of primary ide and other optical to middle of cable with slave jumper and will see what happens

i am sure all my hardware is ok adn is either a configuration problem ie jumpers and position, or a nero problem as i can get each component to work ok using other software in certain circumstances, again apologies if the migraine is making the typing a bit odd

thanks to all for your help

Andy

[glc]

With 80 wire cables, the position of the drive on the cable determines master and slave. That's the purpose of the CS jumper - cable select. The master goes on the end of the cable and the slave goes on the connector in the middle of the cable. The correct end of the cable also has to be put on the motherboard. Master and slave jumpers are legacy - it's for old 40 wire cables that don't do the drive selection internally.

[holidaychicken]

i think it may be sorted, cant say i would make a profit doing this for a living, basically i have laid out the dives as reccomended, still got both optical drives on ide0 new drive set to master at end of cable and older drive in middle set to slave, the wd drive is on ide1 set to CS.

i managed to get nero to try and burn my music to cd but then kept saying DRM checking failed not enough burn licenses, which after cheking all through the net it seems like another load of pants to deal with from nero so have now binned nero 7 that came with drive and all the other tonnes of crud that came with it.

the music burns fine using wmp and copied a dvd using dvd fab platinum which i had a copy of, and i use power dvd that came with the drive which also works ok to play dvds. i have tested burining cd's and playing dvd's in both drives and have copied dvd from drive to drive without a problem.

bit of a mess around just to use basic hardware but there was no way nero was going to work for me without some sort of mental breakdown.

thanks very much for all your help lads, now to catch up on two nights sleep sorting this pile of pooo!!

Andy

[amdalex]

Are you using 80 wire IDE cables or 40 wire IDE cables?

[glc]

It appears to be resolved, Alex - if the hard drive were on 40 wire it wouldn't work jumpered CS and there would be a POST warning saying that it was not in Ultra DMA mode. You *CAN* use master/slave on 80 wire as long as you do not try to override the position with the jumper.

[holidaychicken]

i think the cables are 80 wire, they are a lot thinner than the old type which looked like a big grey belt, these are wide at the end and then go narrow and are inside a bright yellow rubber sleeve, that is probably not the most technical reply, but does that make any sense

cheers

Andy

[glc]

Round sleeved cables are almost always 80 wire.

[holidaychicken]

that sounds right from memory my mate built it a while ago now mentioned it i think

thanks to everyone for your help, thought this was going to be an epic

Andy

[holidaychicken]

It came back to haunt me, everything had been ok for a few days, i burnt dvd to dvd, cd to cd, played tracks and installed software all using both drives.

i tried ripping some music to mp3 using windows media player to convert from wma to mp3 so i can put on a disc for the car from discs i had burnt from musc i bought on hmv online, everything started fine and was half way through when the samaritans moment struck.
it restarted again, and everytime after that i tried ripping tracks it restarted after a few tracks. i thought i had solved when i reseated the ide cable in the suspect drive, the slave drive again, but still restarted after the third album.

i have now swapped the 250 gb drive to primary ide and the two dvd drives to secondary and have ripped four alburns to mp3's using wmp and have burnt the mp3's to one disc using nero 6 in the problem drive and all seems ok so far again.

one thing i have noticed is in device manager the IDE/ATAPI controllers for the two optical drives- transfer mode is set to ultra dma4-ultra66 which is greyed out ans the let bios box is ticked.

i checked in the bios and the PIO settings are set to auto and also underneath the DMA setting is auto as well

is any of this significant or should i stop messing around with things i dont understand before i kill it altogether and have to drop it round my mates house for trauma team/re-sus to fix

thanks

Andy