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General discussion

DVD SATA drives keep leading to eventual crash

by PBobShaffer Feb 14, 2010 10:50AM PST

I've tried three different DVD SATA drives in my dual-boot XP/Vista system and the same thing happens with each one. (XP and Vista are set up on different drives.) The first couple of loads with either XP or Vista everything will run fine. Then I'll get an OS freeze in the middle of whatever I'm doing that will either stop things completely or just pause things for about a minute or two before continuing again. But after that when I boot I'll get pauses in the BIOS loading and will get jibberish when it comes to listing the DVD device. If I can still get it to load Vista it will not show my DVD drive as existing any longer in the My Computer page.

When I disconnect the SATA connector, everything runs fine without the DVD drive hooked up. If I reconnect it I'll get a couple of good boots before it all starts over again. Any help would be appreciated because these are perfectly good drives. (I do run Norton Antivirus and everything checks out.)

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3 Posts

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Tried different SATA cable ?

by VAPCMD Feb 14, 2010 11:03AM PST

How about BIOS updates ?

How about firmware updates ?

What happens with a PATA CD-DVD ?

Everything clean in device manager ?

VAPCMD

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Most common ?

by r. proffitt Forum moderator Feb 14, 2010 9:33PM PST

Any software that uses CDR/W, DVDR/W media as a big floppy drive. The titles are many so I may never guess what you installed or the maker installed. But it happens so often that I always uninstall InCD, DirectCD and others. Any CD/DVD emulators are also on my uninstall list.
Bob

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Solution

by PBobShaffer Mar 11, 2010 11:47PM PST

Actually, I fixed the problem by removing the 2 IDE hard drives I was using for XP and replacing them with another SATA drive, making the system (XP, Vista and DVD drive) all SATA. Now everything works - no more DVD problems.

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