jjisonline:
dodecahedron is right about users reporting InCD problems. Yet InCD 3.51.61 can work if you use good CD-RW media, a modern burner with recent firmware, and your OS is reasonably clean. So if you haven't been scared away yet, read on...
I guess your problems might have been due to bad media.
In the future, report as many details as possible. For instance, did you try to eject your first disc via the InCD icon, or simply by pressing your burner's button? Did you see any screen message when the system crashed? (If you changed your OS policy to reboot upon error, retrieve the standard setting so that error messages appear before rebooting.) Did you examine your Event Log after the crash? Did you remove InCD 3.32 before upgrading to 3.51.61? Did you use Windows Explorer for copying files? Any messages before it froze? Did you test only a single CD-RW disc supplied with your burner? What was the rated speed of your media? Did you do Full Erase before reformatting? Did you observe the same symptoms for normal CD-RW and CD-MRW? Do the lights on your burner indicate writing activity when the system hangs?
My short advice is: Get several CD-RW discs from respectable vendors, re-run your tests and report your results here.
You should also consider which of the following general steps are applicable in your case.
Steps for Troubleshooting InCD Problems under Windows XP
1. Upgrade the firmware of your burner to the latest version from your vendor's or original manufacturer's website.
2. Check your vendor's website for recommended CD-RW media. Search the Web (Google) for reviews of your burner and users' experiences with different media at
www.cdfreaks.com,
www.cdrinfo.com and
www.cdrlabs.com. You may expect problems: 24x re-writers are fairly new and probably not tested much on older media, whereas 24x and even 16x media are hardly available.
3. Get at least a couple of 4x-10x or 4x-12x CDRW discs from several better known vendors (see (2) above). Unfortunately InCD no longer allows you to control rewriting speeds. You can check which speeds are listed for your media in Nero itself (for a blank CD-RW), and in Nero InfoTool. BTW, Nero 5.5.9.17 installs the latest versions of CD Speed and InfoTool, which are highly useful for troubleshooting InCD; otherwise, you may need to download them separately.
4. If you wish to reuse a disc, don't try to save time by using any quick formatting or quick erase options; always do Full Erase in Nero| Recorder| EraseReWritable.
5. Before upgrading to the latest version of InCD from
www.ahead.de, remove the previous version via Control Panel| Add/Remove Programs and reboot.
6. Download the InCD manual from Ahead; although outdated, it gives general ideas about InCD. The help in InCD 3.51.61 doesn't work at all, and C:\Program Files\ahead\InCD\InCD.hlp is difficult to use and outdated.
7. If Service Pack 1 is not installed, remove InCD, install SP1 via Windows Update, and reinstall InCD. In particular, SP1 supports UDF 1.50, so standard (non-Mt. Rainier) InCD discs can be read on most CD/DVD-ROM drives without additional UDF readers.
8. Before formatting with InCD, make sure there are no "heavy" programs running in the background. Also before writing to InCD formatted discs, it may be wise to disable virus scanners, etc.
9. Sometimes InCD works only with Autorun off (as reported by Nero InfoTool). To get Autorun off, either use Notepad to create a file called autorun0.reg that contains the following four lines
REGEDIT4
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Cdrom]
"AutoRun"=dword:00000000
and run it by double clicking on autorun0.reg in Explorer, or edit the registry. (If you replace the final 0 by 1, you'll get Autorun on.)
10. Expect trouble if, before installing InCD, you ran other packet writers (e.g., Roxio's DirectCD), UDF readers (again Roxio's UDFReader) or burning plugins installed "silently" by other applications (e.g., Windows Media Player, WinAmp, RealPlayer, etc). Such applications typically install drivers conficting with InCD, which are not removed even if you remove the application itself. Since I've never installed such software, I can't identify all possible culprits, but you should look for files named as Cd*.sys, Cd*.dll, Ud*.sys, Ud*.dll. Here are listings for my XP Pro SP1 box:
dir C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\cd*.*
08/17/2001 01:52 PM 7,680 CD20XRNT.SYS
08/18/2001 07:00 AM 18,688 CDAUDIO.SYS
08/29/2002 09:58 AM 59,648 cdfs.sys
08/29/2002 09:27 AM 47,488 cdrom.sys
dir C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\ud*.*
08/29/2002 09:06 AM 64,000 udfs.sys
dir C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\cd*.*
08/18/2001 07:00 AM 142,336 CDFVIEW.DLL
08/29/2002 11:40 AM 14,848 cdm.dll
08/18/2001 07:00 AM 15,872 CDMODEM.DLL
08/18/2001 07:00 AM 2,028,032 CDOSYS.DLL
dir C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\ud*.*
08/29/2002 11:41 AM 22,016 udhisapi.dll
For comparable listings, run these dir commands in a cmd window (Start| Run| cmd). If you see other SYS or DLL files on your box, try renaming their .SYS extensions to .SY_ and .DLL to .DL_, and reboot; you may also need to remove the registry settings for these files. For example, as in the CD Gone hack, to clean the registry, either use Notepad to create a file called cdclean.reg that contains the following seven lines
REGEDIT4
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Cdr4_xp]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Cdudf_XP]
[-HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\UdfReadr_xp]
and run it by double clicking on cdclean.reg in Explorer, or edit the registry.
11. Check what Nero InfoTool says about your ASPI layers; see, e.g.,
http://aspi.radified.com
for basic information about ASPI. Apparently Nero and InCD don't need special ASPI, but you may be in trouble if other burning programs required installation of special ASPI layers. Many users reported problems with the latest Adaptec's ASPI (4.7?), and frequently they had to use ForceASPI to revert to version 4.6.
