Panasonic Dvd Burner

[monkeyhanger]

Well the two dvd burners we ordered from ebuyer turned up today.

The total price for the pair was £170.

http://www.windowsforum.org/support/forum/...?showtopic=4805

I told a Friend who was interested and we went halves on the p+p, but muggins has to install both. No big deal. ;)

The drives are oem but do come with 95\98\me\2000 and x\p drivers. There were no jumper settings displayed on the top of the drive and no jumpers on the pins. Although it did have a series of 3 pins on the drive. I plumpt to put it on ide 2 and to disconnect the spare hard drive and cdrw to find it's own setting. Slid the drive in and connected the ide ribbon , power connector and then booted up. the drive was found immediately in post and x\p continued to load. The loading bar took a lot longer than usual. On windows desktop the found new device icon flashed up from the task bar. Windows then proceeded to load the generic drivers for the device. These as usual were crap. Windows asked, nay demanded a reboot. The reboot brought up a bsod and boot into safe mode was called for.

In safe mode a quick trip to device manager to uninstal the drivers and pop in the driver disk to load the right drivers. Asking for a reboot again. This time boots as normal.

rechecking device manager for conflicts and every thing looks good. Insert a dvd disk and it brings up power dvd to load the movie. things are looking fine.

Now it is time to test the software. Double click roxio and select the dvd burn option, "this drive is not supported by roxio". Never did like that crap.

Double click my favourite, nero with the latest x\p patch and the drive is instantly recognised. Hooray for nero.

Slip a recommended dvd-r from my local pc shop ( 25 for £20). "These disks will work with that drive, no sweat". He said.

Please insert a disk in drive H said nero.

AH well, lets try another dvd-r disk.

Ditto and ditto.

********** disks and ******* useless sales assistant.

I call a mate and he has a spindle of 20 dvd-rw's. Who the hell buys 20 dvd-rw's? I'll bring them over right now.

Insert a dvd-rw and nero see's it first time. Drag and drop a load of files and pick BURN. Writing to your disk at 1X speed.

even at !x it burns pretty fast, considering the amount of data.

Conclusion the disks bought are crap.

Now to finish the job. The dvd writer was hogging secondary master, which suited me. I have disconnected the cdrw, that was secondary master and reconnected the secondary slave, the dvd rom.

So the job is finished.

As has been said before " dvd writing is still a hit and miss affair". I think it could be easier if you get the right disks for the job. :D