What would cause 2 Burners to fail simultaneously?

This is a workhorse HP minitower running XPPSP3, very squeaky clean - everything runs well except that both Burners fail. These are both attached to one ribbon cable on an IDE interface.

One is a HP rebranded DVD/RW and the other a Lite-On CD/RW - one of the bygone heroes... fast little bugger.
Both drives seem to read perfectly, and in the past, both would burn perfectly.
Now both drives read perfectly, and neither can burn successfully, delivering slightly different incoherence depending on the media, the burner app used, whatever. If I put a commercial recorded disc, say a movie or an audio cd, in either drive, it works fine. If I put a clean CD/RW in either drive, I get inconsistency... I mean there's nothing there so windows just says it can't open it. If I use Nero to attempt to burn I get an attempt by nero with garbled results - something gets written, but it is incoherent. The cd is left invalid. Pretty much the same with Imgburn. It shows no errors on the drive itself, and will happily accept the job and do the burn, but in verification it takes an eternity to finish, and renders a miscompare error. Trying to access the data on the CD fails. Windows can't open it.

What is causing this?
yes imapi is running.

?
thx
z

 

Remove one drive and see if the other one works now, then it's most likely that the PSU is on the edge of being capable to supply enough power to the burn lasers. Try switching the molex connectors to a different line if you have one extra. Maybe just reseat the cable to the mobo. Replace the ribbon cable, it doesn't go often but it does happen.

 

this is something I was wondering about.. in the old IDE connector scheme, is there a separate 'write' in in that cable? i had wondered if somehow just one or two strands/pins could go wobbly and cause this sort of nuisance on 2 at once:confused

 

Yes, the pin in the middle of the drive with nothing underneath it. I had somehow pushed that pin into the drive, I could read but not write IIRC. There may be others, I'm no optical drive expert, just my experience.

Do the simplest tasks first. There's a common issue here, just need to find it first as both dying at the same time would be like winning the lottery, but the other way around.