My general rule is to buy most technology on the trailing edge. That might be surprising to hear from the "Digital Dad" but frankly the relative improvement you get from new technology is just a great buying it on the trailing edge as it is on the leading edge, and the savings are very significant.
And so when I saw a recordable DVD-ROM drive at $99, it crossed my trailing edge threshold.
This DVD ROM drive is from Emprex, whoever that is. It supports DVD+ and DVD-, whatever that is. Once I saw there were two standards I figured I needed a drive that could read and write both.
The "use case" here was twofold - easy backups of images and music and also writing images and digital movies to DVD so folks can pop them into their DVD players and enjoy. Why force people to sit at their PC to see these things?
The box sat for about a month in my office, just long enough for the return policy to expire. But the other night I got the kids to bed early and figured I could put the screwdriver to the PC in my office (actually a small closet under the stairs).
I removed the side panels as well as the rails screws, etc. The old CD drive (not even CD R/W!) came out easily. I opened the Emprex DVD-ROM box and the drive was well packed. Interestingly, there was not a single piece of paper in the box. Absolutely no instructions whatsoever. No rails screws, nothing. Talk about cutting corners! There were some jumper pins on the back, unlabeled, no doubt for setting the drive as master or slave - but who knows!
The jumper pins looked similar to my CD ROM drive so I move the little joiner thingy to connect the same two pins. I slid the drive in and used my old rail screws, connected the data cable, power and was ready to go.
Sort of.
I powered up and since I heard the hard drives running I knew I at least had the data cable in the right way (red stripe to pin #1!). The drive was recgonized so I inserted the PowerDVD disc. Keep in mind that when you drop in a DVD drive it doesn't mean you can just start playing DVDs. You need a DVD decoder, typically software, to read and render the DVD info properly. I suspected that the PowerDVD software would do just that.
I double clicked on the SETUP and received an "Invalid Win32 application" error.
People ask me what Digital Dad is about and I tell them it's as much about what goes wrong with technology as it is what goes right.
Now given I had no documentation I had to get clever. I can read data from the drive but not run apps. Hmmm..
I did a quick Google and found that this error can be due to corrupted DVDs or CDs. The PowerDVD disc was brand new so I ruled that out, so somewhere along the line the data was getting corrupted. I checked the cable and it was fine. I made sure the IDE controller was in DMA mode (pretty easy thing to do, right?).
I then remembered that I had my OnStream IDE tape drive connected as a secondary drive on that controller. What a piece of junk that is. Never worked right, software was horrible, just a bad bad experience. I figured I would unhook it, since it was very useless, and reboot.
Yep, that did it. Now the DVD ROM works very well. It's even vastly sped up my CD ripping.
Another mystery solved - no dox, jumper pins, DMA modes, Win32 errors, and an old IDE tape drive. All in a night's work I guess.
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