Every time I try to burn a CD my PC gets part way through the task and then bombs. I get a Blue Screen of Death. I use Windows Xp and so get a Memory Dump blah blah....

I have reintalled the Roxio software and my CD drive. It used to work fine. What could be causing it to misbehave?

TR, November 2003

I built a new machine and had blue screen of death all over the place when it fancied to do this. I was running two drives one for CDRW and one for DVD. I had unbranded memory and a cheap 300w power supply that came with the case. After much forum searching it pointed to either of these two things.
I went out and bought a good 400w supply and Kingston memory. No probs ever since. Reckon it was the supply though.

Jon, November 2005

It could be that your power supply is struggling. I have had this problem and I realised that over the years I had added more hard disks, USB toys etc and that it could be my power supply is now not coping.

I used to get Blue Screen Windows Error Messages, but now when I burn CDs I unplug all the toys that I am not using. Since I have been doing this I have burnt CDs successfully.

Ian T, March 2004

I have a solution that worked for me, but I don't know how well it would work for you. I have found out through the blue-screen memory dumps that if your CD writer does not support DMA, then it will cause these blue-screen problems. So, all I had to do was switch DMA off for my CD burner to get it to work.

Here is the exact process I went through to switch off DMA to my CD burner:

1) Find out which IDE channel your CD burner is on (either Primary or Secondary), and also find out whether it is Master or Slave. (You can do this through a re-boot, if you don't know already. Just re-boot and look at the screen at the start of the boot.)
2) Go into Windows, if you haven't already, and right-click "My Computer" and select "Properties".
3) Go to the "Hardware" tab and click "Device Manager".
4) Click the "+" next to "IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers".
5) Right-click the entry for the IDE channel that your burner is on, and select "Properties".
6) Go to the "Advanced Settings" tab.
7) Change the transfer mode from "DMA if available" to "PIO Only" for either Device 0 or Device 1, depending on whether your burner is the Master (Device 0) or the Slave (Device 1).

I sincerely hope this helps you. I have had no more problems with my CD burner since I did the above steps, and I hope you also have no more problems with yours.

Ashley Kampta, December 2003

I have had this too.

I have installed all the latest Windows Update Files and reinstalled Roxio and my CD Rom's driver.

I've also tried using Nero and this produces the same fault.

My PC is still crashing. The message on the "BLUE SCREEN OF DEATH" varies each time. I'm wondering if it is not a software fault, but a BIOS or VIA chip issue, but this stuff is over my head.

Could someone suggest some simple things to try please.

R.E.I, November 2003