CDRW Drives keep breaking

Big Brother · Mon 31 Jan, 2005 18.35

Hey guys I've got a bit of a query for you all,

My PC is relatively new, all the parts have been replaced mostly within the last year, the motherboard was replaced at Christmas 2003 and I'm not sure if it's the problem, but I doubt it.

Before I replaced it I had problems with my CDRW drive, it kept crashing the PC and not appearing in the BIOS on restart. Normally removing the wires from it restarting and then putting the wires back in & restarting again would work. Eventually around 6 months later it died completely and I had to replace it. Now the new CDRW has just stopped working and causing the same crashing of the PC. I haven't touched it since it did it.

Now for me I need to replace equipment yearly as the system is quite heavily used for everything and it's used everyday so some parts burn out - don't live up to fast pace I work at etc. The least used piece of equipment is my CDRW drive, I play CD's in it but I rarely write CD's anymore.

Has anyone got any idea what could be my problem as the drive isn't even that old.

Sput · Tue 01 Feb, 2005 19.53

Could be a dodgy power supply, though I'm clutching at straws here.

DJGM · Wed 02 Feb, 2005 14.55

What's the current spec of your system? Chances are (assuming you've got a lot of internal
components) the PSU you have installed may not be quite powerful enough for your system.

Big Brother · Wed 02 Feb, 2005 18.57

DJGM wrote:What's the current spec of your system? Chances are (assuming you've got a lot of internal
components) the PSU you have installed may not be quite powerful enough for your system.

Off the top of my head, it's an AMD Athlon 2Ghz, 1Gb of DDR RAM, ATI Radeon 128Mb Graphics, Creative 1024 Sound Card, Hauppauge Nova-T PCI, DLink ethernet card, Firewire Card, 2 Hard Drives, DVD ROM... that's about it from what I remember I've put in there. It's got a 300 Watt PSU.

If it is this then I don't understand because it's been running fine without any real problems just recently this has happened. I have since unplugged the drive and haven;t checked it again to see if it works.

Sput · Wed 02 Feb, 2005 23.37

You could probably do better with a higher power PSU, it won't do any harm and they're not *too* expensive these days, I suppose.