Sony CD burner reading but not writing

This is my first post on the forum so please bear with me.

I have a Sony MPD-AP20U portable CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive that I purchased a couple of years ago for burning CDs of my guitar compositions. Great little unit...worked perfectly when it was first installed, and very fast. I am using an older Compaq Presario 1200 Laptop with Win98SE, Athlon K6 475meg, 128M RAM. I have the Sony drive plugged into an Apricorn EZ USB2 Cardbus adapter, since the onboard port is a USB1 and too slow for this unit. Incidentally, the CD-ROM drive on the laptop quit working a long time ago (I've seen this a lot on these laptops)...one of the reasons I opted for a better external drive.

Subsequently, I had to use the cardbus slot for a DSL adapter (thanks a lot, SBC), and so had to unplug the Apricorn unit; unfortunately this was done without first stopping the USB Cardbus driver (my wife was there, and she just pulled the card out from it's slot before I could react; I still wonder if this caused the trouble).

The Sony unit has languished for almost 2 years, until we moved to another town, where the DSL service was installed using an ADSL router, thereby freeing up my cardbus slot for the Apricorn USB2 card. I re-installed the driver, connected the card, connected the Sony CD-RW. It reads data, DVDs, everything just fine, but when I try to write anything to the drive I get the error message that the 'drive is not ready/no disk in drive'. My computer does not see the drive when trying to write. I also ran a drive check that I found on the Sony storage support site; it runs the write test first and it failed, so did not run the rest of the test. I also installed an ASPI fix that they had there...no good, didn't help.

I looked in System Information and it shows the driver installed for the USB2, however it also shows that the USB Network Interface is not installed. I have tried re-installing the driver a couple of times with no effect on this (not even certain that this is the problem). Interestingly, the computer seems to detect the Sony's Memory-Stick drive just fine, although I haven't tested this, because I don't have a Memory-Stick handy.

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

Max

 

bump

 

Check the Apricorn site to see if you have to do a cleanup (registry, etc.) before reinstalling the drivers and DL any updated drivers. Installing/uninstalling USB related stuff can be very order-sensitive. Get one step wrong, and no-worky ever more...

.bh.

 

What CD writing software are you using?

 

Hi A...
Thanks for the response. The unit was bundled with BHA 'B's Recorder 5' and 'B's Clip'. I've also tried to copy some .jpg files from Photostudio 5 (also part of the software bundle) with the same result.

Max

 

Uninstall it, and see if you can windows xp's built in software.

 

Hmmm, this reply is incomplete; do you mean re-install the built-in drivers from XP? This is a Win98SE OS.

 

bump

Incidentally, I have tried to write with a few different programs, all with the same result.

 

Perhaps installing the ASPI layer software might help too. Get it from Adaptec and run the utility that comes with it prior to installing. The utility will tell you if ASPI is already installed and if so, what version. Doesn't need to be installed if the current vesion is already there. ASPI often helps with burner problems and almost never hurts.
. Adaptec says it's for SCSI - ignore that and install anyway it has solved lots of strange burner problems for me.

.bh.

 

My bad. Windows 98 typically cannot use more than one program at a time, depending on the applications, of course.

Uninstall all CD writing applications, install just one, and try it again.

 

Finally! A SOLUTION!

OK it goes like this: Apparently my system got confused because it was still looking for the POS Toshiba CDROM that came on this machine and would not see the Sony external drive.

Reboot in SAFE MODE, go to Settings>Control Panel>System>Device Manager.
Expand the CDROM list and <REMOVE> all instances of CDROM drives from the list, INCLUDING the drive that you're trying to persist.

Reboot in NORMAL MODE. The system now sees the drive and recognizes when it has a blank disk in it.