My neighbour recently bought a pioneer dvr-111 drive, but was having problems copying CDs (he has a P3 800Mhz).

I said: hey, I’ll take a look!

Just as it starts writing to a blank CD, nero gives a CRC error and makes a coaster.

I try just burning a data CD, at a slow write speed), and I make another coaster… Hmm, not good.

Having had similar problems with my crappy Samsung drive over a year ago (and fixing things with a firmware update), I decide to upgrade the Pioneer firmware from V1.06 to the latest (1.29). I download the new firmware, but when I go to install it, I get an error message. (n)

I stuff around with a few different firmware versions, but no luck.

I eventually remove the drive and install it into my system (an amd duron 1.3 Ghz), and it writes CDs & DVDs without any problem… I upgrade the firmware with no hiccups. I then try in in my own P3 system, and it works fine.

I figure it should work correctly now, and if not, then its probably a problem with nero 7, which I can replace with nero 6.

I put the drive back into its original computer and it gives crc errors again… arggg!!!

It cant be nero, as it is just reporting the crc from the hardware.

However, I now have an idea of what the problem is: the burner was plugged into the ‘slave’ cable… and while working on it at the office, I changed the jumper to cable select. I suspect the old cd drive also had a forced master or slave jumper setting, so based on its cable selection, nero was probably getting conflicting messages from the 2 ‘masters’ or the 2 ‘slaves’.

I just unplugged the power from the older CDROM, and everything worked perfectly.

Sometime you just cannot assume that a PC has been put together correctly…