Hello everyone, this is my first post so sorry in advance if this is not the right forum to seek help about this problem.

I bought an Optiarc AD7190A a month ago which randomly would read or burn cds or dvds on my computer (mother ASUS A7V8X-X), most of the times would fail. Because of this, I tried the burner on my work: it worked flawlessly on 2 computers, reading and burning cds and dvds. Both computers had even worse performance than mine in general. Mine is an Athlon XP 2000+ and those where Pentium III and Semprons I think.
Well, I tried again the burner on my computer, this time I randomly changed the PIO mode in the bios from Auto to 0, and DMA mode from Auto to 1. I booted, and the burner worked PERFECTLY on Windows 2000 SP4. I even upgraded the firmware.

The problem is that the burner still does not work on Linux/UNIX (Ubuntu, Fedora, FreeBSD, you name it), it behaves like it when it was in Auto mode. I/O errors.

What are these PIO and DMA modes? what should I try and why the "Auto" options of my motherboard didnt work well even to Windows? How to make the burner work on Linux/UNIX like it does on Windows now? The burner its working for hardware as secondary master.

Thanks in advance.

Maybe you could replace the ide cable (with an 80 wire ide cable) and try again?

Its worth a try on what Chef said. Unistalling the drive in the device manager and then rebooting computer let windows reinstall the drive might help to without using a new cable.