This will be kind of a sketchy but here goes:

Quadruple boot (Knoppix, win98, Suse and WinXP under grub) AMD64 system with one SATA disk and one IDE drive and a Lite-on SOHW-1673 DVD/cd/RW burner.

Grub, WIN98, Knoppix, SuSe, reside on IDE, XP resides on SATA. Boots normally from IDE and in normal use (read after re-asigning booting through BIOS) from the SATA drive directly into XP.

This weird configuration is historically grown from my old student computer and some upgrading. Well ... everybody needs to tinker with something... Worked perfectly for a year and a half.

Problem: during a WinXP session with Nero I also had a memory absorbing graphical proces running. So my burn failed. No biggy, one lost cd-recordable.

After this the drive doesn't recognize any media under windows. It blinks and spins up but WinXP reports no disk.

However booting a live version cd or reading Linux disks from one of the linux OS-es still works. Can't burn from them though . KB3 doesn't recognize media and forcing it results in errors (have log but I think it's drive related not driveR or software/OS related). Under Linux also no recognition of windows/Dos Data-cdroms.

Done sofar:
-flashed the firmware of the lite-on under Win XP. Worked.Flashtool reports upgrade so does cdrdao.
-Did the whole DMA check (no PIO mode I think its called) under system properties.
-deinstalled the drive and IDE 2 where the Lite-on is master (no other on IDE2) and rebooted: no succes

My first question would be: Why can a linux livedistro still boot from the Lite-on but a bootable WinXP installation disk does not.

So I guess my problem is partly filesystem related.

I have this sneaky suspicion that somehow there's some kind of cache in the Lite-on that's clogged or something for lack of a better word.

Since the drivers used are totally different under Linux and Win it must be drive related . But frankly I'm out of ideas.

Suggestions are very welcome. This has been bugging me.

Buying a new drive would be easiest but curiosity is preventing me.

Thanks for (any)replies.

Regards M75

Try burning a cd via command line. Use the cdrecord command to try to burn a cd. Watch for errors. Whatever is keeping you from burning cds may be the same problem in windows.

Beyond that, in windows, clear out tmp files, especially those with a tilde (~) in the file name. I haven't used windows in years, but when I did, such files sometimes trapped error conditions which affected my ability to do something. Deleting those tmp files removed the trapped error condition, and I could resume whatever it was I wanted to do.

Thanks for the advice and reply. Tried that but that also gave no further clues. However some serious Googling revealed that this kind of trouble is common with Lite-ons. (=Troubles after freeze-burns)

My guess about the drive itself retaining information about burns is correct. Lite-ons and perhaps other writers retain calibration data of the last four burns. A wrong burn can lock up the drive.

Flashing with Lite-on made firmware's does not refresh or reset this. (Most information at: http://codeguys.rpc1.org/firmwares.html).

Using the EEPROM_Utility I reset the calibration data. Then I reflashed with the latest firmware from Lite-on.

The result is that my combodrive is able to recognize and burn DVD's again. Support for CDR/RW/W is still not back.

To be continued...

Kind regards, M75