PX-716A Install trashes system

[jimdobro]

I got a PX-716A (NOT the SA, just the regular IDE drive--TLA #203 / December 2004 / Made in China) in my hot little hands yesterday and proceeded to install it on the secondary IDE channel as Master with my old HP CD-Writer Plus 8200 as slave. The system recognized the drive and asked to install software that was not registered with XP. I gave the go-ahead. When the system finished booting, it was acting very strangely. Very slow. The taskbar had been reduced to a thin line at the bottom of the screen and would not open. Virus protection complained of a lack of resources. I opened task manager and found CPU usage running 100%. Under Device Manager, no device properties would open--none. All in all, the system showed signs of just running full tilt and not allowing anything using moderate resources to open. Even system restore would not open. Eventually, I removed both the HP CD-R/W and the PX-716A, as well as the 80 cable IDE connector, just to eliminate these variables. No dice. I ran CHKDSK and discovered errors. Cleaned these up and eventually got the taskbar back. Safe Mode is no help--it won't launch System Restore either and the taskbar is still missing there, so I can't really do much in Safe Mode.

Any ideas? I'm getting a bit desperate. FWIW, I've built a number of systems and installed lots of new hardware. This one's got me stumped. Thought it might be Intel Application Accelerator, but I don't seem to have this installed. My system has been stable for over a year and is not overclocked. If I had to guess, I guess a conflict between the driver/software the Plextor installed and the SATA or IDE bus or SATA hard drive I'm using. BTW, I did not get so far as installing anything off the Plextor DVD.

Here's my system:
Windows XP Professional SP2
ABIT IC7-G motherboard
Pentium 4 3.0 GHz
1 GB HyperX KHX3200
ATI 9600XT
Creative Sound Blaster Audigy2ZS Pro
Antec Sonata Case
Maxtor 6Y160MO 160Gb SATA hard drive
HP CD-Writer Plus 8200 CD-R/W

Thanks for your help.

[bobmitchell]

I do not believe that the Plextor drive hosed your system...I believe that Roxio Easy Media Creator did. Especially if you have another software suite like Nero running.

1. Do you have two packet writing softwares (InCD and Drag 2 Disc) running at the same time?
2. If you only have Roxio running...uninstall the entire Easy Media Creator suite. I have the full version and when I installed it the first time...hosed...I was lucky I backed my system up first. Then I restored and never but EMC 7 back in. My wife likes EMC7...so I had to install Windows XP three times before it installed correctly. I am not saying that EMC 7 is totally bad...but it interacts in some very strange ways with hardware / software. Be very careful with this one. If you do uninstall Roxio software...go to their website (www.roxio.com) and search for Roxizap (a utility that will clean up left over files and registry entries)...and run it...ONLY AFTER you uninstall Roxio.

See if this helps

If scenario 1 is valid...uninstall InCD..your best bet

Bob

I just noticed that you are running WinXP Service Pak 2...the version of EMC 7 that comes with the Plextor drive is NOT compatible with SP2. Roxio has NOT issued an update to fix this to date...there are many people that are upset by this...

[tazdevl]

What Bob said. Not good to have the two apps on the same computer. Also, even after uninstall, it's a good idea to clean everything out of the registry too.

[ruderacer]

I have the 716 installed on my system and I did install the EMC that comes with the Plextor and I have not experienced what you are going through. I have the latest Nero installed on my system and I have not had any issues. I do not have InCD installed because I have had issues with InCD and other programs, so this time I left it off.

You may want to use Nero's Clean utility and reinstall Nero from scratch, but this time don't install InCD and see if that helps any. You may also want to use the Roxiozap to clean and reinstall.

Good luck.

RR

[jimdobro]

[quote="bobmitchell"]I do not believe that the Plextor drive hosed your system...I believe that Roxio Easy Media Creator did. Especially if you have another software suite like Nero running.

No, no guys, that's not it. I never got that far. Never installed a thing from the install disk. All this happened after the automatic driver install when Win XP recognized the PX716A. So I haven't installed Roxio or Nero (I do have an ancient version of EZ CD Creator on the machine, but unless it reacted to just having the drive sitting out there, that's not it).

At this point, all the IDE devices are removed from the system, the software was never loaded, and WinXP is behaving very, very weird.

[Ian]

Optical drives like the PX-716A don't require any new drivers. They use the system's existing IDE drivers. I'm guessing what you saw was Plug n Pray.. err Play detecting the new drive.

Since you saw hard drive errors, the hard drive might be failing. If it was me, I'd start there.

[Justin42]

Dumb question to only answer a minor point, but have you tried resizing the task bar back to its normal size? If you hover the mouse over various parts of the thin line, does it change to up-and-down arrows? (meaning you can drag up to make it wider?)

My machine at work occasionally freezes for a few seconds, which is just long enough for it to register me moving the mouse down as a "drag the taskbar to a tiny line" for some reason, and I have to drag it back up manually..

[jimdobro]

Dumb question to only answer a minor point, but have you tried resizing the task bar back to its normal size? If you hover the mouse over various parts of the thin line, does it change to up-and-down arrows? (meaning you can drag up to make it wider?)

No, that's not the problem. I was actually unable to drag the thin line. The good news is, the taskbar came back at some point. The bad news is that the system is still majorly screwed up.

I agree with everybody that it's extremely unlikely dropping an IDE device into the system would screw things up, yet this is what happened. Did I fry something with static in the process? Maybe, but I was using a grounding strap and the humidity was high. Did it happen to coincide with a hard drive going bad? Maybe, but the hard drive continues to check out okay after that initial CHKDSK fix. Something I have noticed is that Device Manager now reports an 82801EB chipset rather than the 82801ER Chipset that's actually in the machine. My current hypothesis is that during my last round of BIOS and driver upgrades, I either installed the wrong Intel drivers or Intel made a mistake that didn't show up with my old legacy CD burner but went nuts when the Plextor dropped in. Does this sound at all feasible?

Thanks to everybody for your ideas.

Jim N.

[Ankerson]

You will need to goto the Abit website, not Intels to get the newest drivers and software for your motherboard and the latest bios update too.

[jimdobro]

Since you saw hard drive errors, the hard drive might be failing. If it was me, I'd start there.

I think you came closest to nailing it, Ian. After mucking about for a few days, I finally went through the rigmarole of putting together a slipstreamed XP-SP2 disk with my wife's laptop and reinstalled XP. That seems to have done the trick. (Well, some of Earthlink's *&^! software is acting nasty, but that's a different issue.) My best guess is that the Plextor installation somehow caused the system to discover the hard drive errors that were already lurking out there. Don't know what happened to the drive itself--it appears to be in okay shape after CHKDSK repaired the file errors. Now I guess I need to decided whether to invest $80 in SpinRite to see if the drive is failing or use it to buy another hard drive and just use this one for backup.

I haven't installed any new software yet, but the Plextor drive is sitting out there, recognized by the system, and reading CDs, so things are looking okay.

Thanks for everybody for throwing ideas at me. And thanks for the heads-up on Roxio-Nero conflicts.

Jim N.

[dodecahedron]

i'm not sure about this, but i think SpinRite is for FAT32 partitions only, doesn't work on NTFS. check it out before you buy.

[wrahn]

I had the same problem as Jimdbro after I installed the PX-617A and the PlexTools Pro. I also updated the PlexTools to version 2.19a. When I opened and closed down my computer PlexTools seemed to dominate my computer, in fact, I't wouldn't shut down and I had to hit the "End Now" button to close my computer.

I used the drive with no problems last night and had the same old shut down problem when I shut down. This morning the computer had a case of lazy and was slooooow! The CPU indicated 100% usage. I ran Norton SystemWorks and nothing seem to work. I finally deleted PlexTools using the Control Panel method and re-booted the computer and I'm back up to speed.

I'll wait until someone more knowledgeable than I figures it all out before I install PlexTools again. I already had Nero and RecordNow installed so I only installed Plextools from the supplied disk.

I forgot to indicate I also updated the PX-716A firmware to 1.04 and the hardware is revision 2.

[ETP]

I had a crash also after a fw update to my 3500 from Liddy at CD freaks. I put an original movie disk in my 716 and a blank in the 3500. It did not like that at all. So I flashed back my 3500 to 2.18 but now it is stuck on 3500AG as a drive identifier. Seems to be ok at this time but very strange. I will try another original in my plex shortly. Works fine as a recorder so far.

[bill]

No, no guys, that's not it. I never got that far. Never installed a thing from the install disk. All this happened after the automatic driver install when Win XP recognized the PX716A. So I haven't installed Roxio or Nero (I do have an ancient version of EZ CD Creator on the machine, but unless it reacted to just having the drive sitting out there, that's not it).

At this point, all the IDE devices are removed from the system, the software was never loaded, and WinXP is behaving very, very weird.

Wrahn,

Jimdobro said he never used the install disk

[ETP]

The notebook WS is what I had trouble with.

[ETP]

Everytime I insert the notebook into the 716 it crashes my system!

[ETP]

And AVP. This definately not cool!

[ETP]

Got an e-mail from Plex in 1 min and they said uninstall Sonic DLA and INCD. Well I never realized I had Sonic DLA installed. Fixed the problem. :bow:

[Justin42]

Ooooooh, nasty conflict. DLA hates pretty much ANY burning software that's not RecordNow... InCD seems to conflict with a LOT....

Both of those on one system... I'm amazed you could even get it to boot!

Glad the problem's solved, though!

[ETP]

I did not have INCD installed because of a previous experience years ago. That was just a TEC support statement from Plex. Very fast help! I was very surprised someone was online to help.
5 burners and this is the only one that had a conflict with DLA! So what is DLA?

[jimdobro]

Jimdobro said he never used the install disk

Just checked back in and thought I'd clear things up. I really never did get to the install disk. My best guess is that the hard disk had some corrupted files and the hardware installation invoked something in WinXP that used those files and it all went south. Not the fault of the Plextor at all. The good news is, after reinstalling Windows and doing a search and destroy on Earthlink software in the registry (that's another story), Win XP and the Plextor seems to be working fine, as does the Nero software I installed (didn't install the Roxio).

Cheers,
Jim