i tried all possible combinations of master, slave and cable select, and the only way my samsung burner will work is if i disconnect the other one. any ideas? thanks.

i tried all possible combinations of master, slave and cable select, and the only way my samsung burner will work is if i disconnect the other one. any ideas? thanks.
I would change the cable! Try that. Hope it helps...

FYI you can only access one device per channel at a time. So you wouldn't be able to simultaneously use both burners without a big performance hit. That is also why IDE RAID recommends only one hard drive per channel.

SATA does away with this by only giving the option of one drive per channel.

FYI you can only access one device per channel at a time. So you wouldn't be able to simultaneously use both burners without a big performance hit. That is also why IDE RAID recommends only one hard drive per channel.

SATA does away with this by only giving the option of one drive per channel.
This is not accurate. While the devices are not in use at the same instant, that time slice is not the issue. I suspect the performance on the channel is set low.

In Windows Control Panel, Open System. Select the Hardware tab, and click on the Device Manager button. Expand the IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers. Under Primary and Secondary IDE Channel (right click, select Properties), open the Advanced Settings tab. The Transfer Mode should be DMA If Available. If it is not, change it each device and channel (and it will require a restart). Modern DVD writers should be Ultra DMA Mode 2 when detected.

I routinely write at 16X to two DVD drives on the same channel in multi-write mode in Nero.

all is dma if available. I swapped the cable and it still wont burn.

the burner that won't work, was on the same cable with a different burner before (DVD also), and it worked fine. when i swapped the burner it was with (now just a cd rom burner) it won't work. Could this be the problem? That it's paired with a cd burner? thanks.

[QUOTE=Mo Zee]all is dma if available. I swapped the cable and it still wont burn.

I've had the same trouble and have found that my burners need to be on their own IDE channels, and that they have to be on the motherboard, rather than on my PCI IDE port expander cards. I don't know why I've had this limitation with pretty much every system I've tried, but I've had various revisions of the nVidia nForce (1, 2, 3) chip sets. Other chipsets may not have this problem. The Pioneer drives are so picky that they have to be Master and seem to need to have their own IDE cable with no Slaves devices. Other DVD burners (Sony, NEC, BenQ) are less picky but still demand to be IDE Master or they won't burn properly.

Oh, and I feel like such a dork ....

You can bring up the System Properties panel with keyboard shortcut Start Key + Break key.

I've had the same trouble and have found that my burners need to be on their own IDE channels, and that they have to be on the motherboard, rather than on my PCI IDE port expander cards. I don't know why I've had this limitation with pretty much every system I've tried, but I've had various revisions of the nVidia nForce (1, 2, 3) chip sets. Other chipsets may not have this problem. The Pioneer drives are so picky that they have to be Master and seem to need to have their own IDE cable with no Slaves devices. Other DVD burners (Sony, NEC, BenQ) are less picky but still demand to be IDE Master or they won't burn properly.

thanks. i guess i'll just have to keep that old cd burner unplugged till i really need to use it- i occasionally encounter cds that my dvd roms can't read.

Most of the IDE cards available don't support DMA 0 (I think that is the mode that burners require) I tried a couple different ones in my burner box until I found this out. SIGII make ones that work. I posted about this in the thread about building your one DVD duplicator M

Sometimes DVD burner's don't play nice on the same channel.

Eventually SATA will fix all this for us :)