Hi, ive been having a problem lately with a LiteOn LTR-4025S. Seems when a program (CD Info tool for example) tries to access the drive, the computer reboots and when it comes back up, it says it has recovered from a fatal error. I tried uninstalling software, and even tried it on a fresh WinXP install, same thing happens.

The drive is attached to a Maxtor UDMA 100 controller card (the 4 slots on the motherboard are full with drives already) and everything seems ok with windows (it sees the drive and reports its working properly).

The strange part is I have a Yamaha 2100S installed, and it used to have this same problem. If you used CDRWin for example, and tried to write at 8X, 10X or 12X, your get rebooted with the Fatal Error message.

The Yamaha drive seemed ok after a format and reinstall of everything on C:, so I tried that for the LiteOn, but it didn't help.

I've tried drivers for the controller card, updated the cdrw's firmware, aspi drivers and all .. still nothing seems to help.

If anyone has any idea, it would be a great help.

Sorry if this has been posted baout before, I searched but didnt find anything. I'm not even totally sure WHAT to search for

Thanks

Oh another thing, the IDE controller card shows up in windows device manager under the SCSI and RAID Controllers section, is that normal? Thanks again

Well these problems is normal when the drive is not connected to the main IDE controller on the mainboard.

Nothing could be done about it except move the drive to the main IDE controller on the mainboard.

ok there is ONE type of add-on IDE controller that I've found to be working properly and that is controllers based on the silicon image IDE controller chip:

www.siliconimage.com and www.cmd.com is their homepage.

Their CMD-649 ATA100 and CMD-680 ATA133 controllers seems to be working ok with optical drives.

All cards based on the promise chips (tested cards from UDMA66 to UDMA133) seems to have sporadic problems with optical drives, works nice for harddrives though.

All card based on the highpoint chip (tested UDMA66 and UDMA100 cards) also have various problems with optical drives, use only for harddrives.

I do not have experience with other IDE controllers though (like those based on the AMI chip for example).

Thanks for the reply, I was thinking about that this morning on my way to work (I'm obsessed with this now ) When I get home I'm going to swap the CDRW drive over to the secondary slave I guess.

Or would it be better to put it as the master on the secondary channel and then move the two HDDs over to the Maxtor controller? (Which is a promise based card)

Thanks again

It's best to have the harddrives on the promise card.

Secondary slave is the worst place ot connect the drive (secondary master is one of the better places to connect it).

Thanks again, I too the two HDDs off the secondary IDE and put them both onto the controller card, then made the LiteOn CDRW drive the secondary master. Works perfectly! Thanks for the help

(As an added bonus, WinXP even kept the original drive order, none of them were out of place. sweet)

Thanks