IDE to USB Issue with CDRW Drive

[Kalo]

I just plunked $60 down on a 5.25" External expension bay to make use of my burner and a few standard IDE hard drives i have laying around. The HDDs work perfectly (if maybe a little slow, but whatever) but the CDRW/DVD combo drive won't record. It'll show up as a drive and even autoplays when i plug it in. What i can't do with it is back up my pictures like i want to. Windows XP only seems to see it as a reader, not a writer. Help!

I've tried to use Nero, Media Player, and windows explorer to send files to it, but nero tells me that another program is using it, Media player only sees it as a reader, not a writer, and windows explorer won't give me the option to write directly to disk.

[Rosuav]

If the hard drives are working slowly, check to see if you have USB 2.0 working (USB 1 is much slower, way too slow for hard disks).

The burner - Have a look in Device Mangler (Control Panel, System, Hardware tab, Device Manager button) and see how it's listed. It might be a detection problem - if Windows low-level services won't see it as a burner, no application will. A slightly non-standard drive may be seen as read-only, you may need to get a dedicated driver. Look up the manufacturer's web site.

[Leshrak]

Kalo, if you've never had a burner installed in the PC before, you may need to fix the ASPI layer in Windows (this is a common problem I've had after reinstalling windows in the past on older xp, win2k & 98):
http://www.pgstar.com/cdburner/aspi.htm

It's pretty straightforward and easy to do, and the symptoms that you're describing are exactly what my previous incarnations of windows did to me

[Kalo]

I've got a burner in the laptop already, it's just fried and would cost me a lot more to fix than to get an external one working, or at least thats what i thought until i started having problems.

maybe the adaptec patch will work tho. i'll try i this afternoon.