DVD burner problem

Have a bit of an odd problem with the Sony DVD burner in my wife's comp. System specs are as follows. MSI MB, 645 chipset, P4 2.8 Prescott, 1 gig ram, MSI 9200SE VC, 120 gig WD SATA boot drive, 80 gig eide WD, 160 gig WD eide, Asus 50X CD-ROM, Sony 8X DVD burner, Compro TV capturecard/PVR, 350 W PSU. The problem is that when a disk is inserted in the DVD drive, the system freezes, almost everytime. A reboot will usually fix it, but not always. Sometimes it freezes partway through the reboot. The drive generally works well, otherwise (although it doesn't like some Taiwanese media.) This problem doesn't occur with the CD-ROM which is on the same cable. Both optical drives are on the secondary EIDE channel, with the burner as master. Any ideas or suggestion would be most welcome. Thank you in advance. I won't be able to get back to the board till much later, but would appreciate any replies.

 

the dvd burner could be on its way out, is it still under warranty?

 

Not under warranty. It has beeen doing this for quite some time. It burns fine. It may have done this since the installation of this MB.

 

since you say this, when you installed the mobo, did you correctly install the chipset drivers etc..
1)You can try these steps also: Set the burner as the slave just for testing purposes and the cdrom as master and see how that goes
2) Try swapping the ide cable for another
3) Try using a different power connector for the burner.
4) In the device manager, in the properties for the burner, is it in PIO mode or DMA mode?

it could also just be that the burner has an internal electrical fault, might be easier to get a new one than fix it since they are so cheap nowadays

 

as always check the cables are connected fully with the burner on the end of the chain, and the jumper of the burner is set as master and the jumper of the cdrom as slave. I've never trusted using the cable select function.

Sorry if you already know this, but it never hurts to check

 

Thanks for the replies. I will try all your suggestions as soon as I can get to it. I do appreciate you taking the time to reply.