Are you drives showing as UDMA in windows BTW?

Well, tried HUTIL, but it did nothing. I burnt it to a CD, put it in the drive, started up the PC with the drive set first, but jack sh*t.



No, they're showing transfermode as "DMA if possible". But at "present transfermode" they show as "not applicable" or "not of application" and the boxes are greyed out. I'm not sure what it is called, as I have a Dutch system now.

This riddle has turned into an enigma!

As a 'safe' experiment, you could try 'uninstalling' the DVD drive via the device manager
and reboot. Windows should detect it and reinstall the drive. Sometimes this resets any
weird changes that may have been made to the drive. But honestly, that is just a shot
in the dark....

Hehe, I was wondering if that would be a useful option, LOL. Now you're suggesting it. I'm gonnna do it tonight!

Mmm, tried it. After restarting the PC, I didn't even get the "new hardware found" notification. Nothing changed, the image files still play back very blocky.

you tried ubuntu?

Me finds it strange that spud always suggests trying ubuntu.
I am curious, why is that?

typical linux fanboy

I suspect your problem is a faulty board.

You can build your old pc on the table without a case, to test them in. Just sit a gfx card in the slot & plug a PSU into the board/drives. Its messy, but thats how 99/100 shops do it.

Hope you get it fixed soon

Not much time in the near future. Gonna test some furhter thingies, maybe even try Ubuntu (do I have to install the entire OS to do so?) and if all fails, I'm gonna buy a new DVD burner. I don't really need a new HDD, so it's gonna be a pity, but I'll take the loss. My damage will be only 20 Euros something anyway.

OMG smart ass!



@ Slayer: Well, yeah, I'm out of ideas. Bad Bugs may have it
right with a bad MB. If you have other optical drives to try out
on the MB that would be another way to go. Other than that,
I got nothing. Sorry...

No, it is also available as a "live CD", which loads into your RAM and runs from there.
On a PC with decent hardware this is quite fast.

because it rules out windows being the problem, basic fault diagnostic you know, ubuntu can read NTFS partitions if necessary, and as you omited to you don't even have to install it. if you mean the choice of distro, its the one that supports the most hardware off the bat.

@pca, actually I'm not a big fan of ubuntu, I generally use windows (and in this case vista), but i have a couple of ubuntu boxes, a suse box, use redhat and centos at work and used to use HPUX and Solaris

I'll try the livedisc next week (I don't have time this weekend). When it fails, I'm gonna buy a new DVD burner. It will be much less hassle than changing the MB.

I found one more reason to switch to ubuntu. This is mostly interesting for those, who want to play some of their windows games on linux:

1.) Download and install the WINE emulator
2.) Site for configuring WINE to properly playback the game of your choice: http://appdb.winehq.org/appbrowse.php?catId=2
3.) Because most games rely in DirectX you will have to install that too. Here is how: http://www.wine-reviews.net/wine-review ... -wine.html

PS: You will probably need to install the proprietary drivers for your graphic card, to get nice FPS and fluid gameplay.
Here is the link to the ATI driver: http://ati.amd.com/support/drivers/linu ... adeon.html.
Here is how you install it: http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Ubuntu ... tion_Guide (I chose "Method 2")

This worked for me and I can now play GTA2 in a window on Xubuntu. It rocks.

wine is sketchy; i've always used windows for games (although i've not really played a game in any format since before xmas).

I thought so too. The last time I tried wine (over 5 years ago) it couldn't run a single windows application.
But look at http://appdb.winehq.org/. You can play Counter-Strike, Battlefield and even WoW with wine.

what about crysis, empire: total war, GTA4, etc?

Burnt the iso file in the link karst provided on page 1. Since I'm a total n00b with Ubuntu, I'm not sure what to do next. Nothing is happening so far, with the disc sitting in the drive.

Since the HUTIL thing failed, I thought maybe trying to solve a problem with the faulty DVD burner by using that same DVD burner to make a disc, might not be the best solution...

Can you boot to the disc? Can you explore the disc... is it readable by the drive?