Rob, I used to have a parallel port CDR along with a slow hard drive and it was all real fussy. I had to defrag the hard drive before doing the burns, not use the computer while it was working, not have a screen saver or anything else with the hard drive going on. After a while even that didn't help, turns out the 7200 series HP burner I had was notorious for failing after about a year of life, whether used a lot or not. It would still read and write to the CDR, but there's a seperate laser that did the burning and it would start in the wrong place. You could look at the CDR and see it, the coasters would all start a couple of mm's further out on the disc than they should, and then they'd burn 1/2-3/4 of an inch and quit.
I realize that the drive I had wasn't made by HP, Phillips I think, but I will never buy another POS HP burner, or computer again, total garbage.
I guess one way to see if it's the burner or the hard drive access is whether it only fails during the actual burn and not the test. |
