Justin diligently tried to help me with my burner problem last night.
Side note first: the inability to read the CD on the CD-ROM was probably caused by the CD itself, not the drive; I tried another CD minutes later and it worked.
Going on. He asked me a few questions, and I was impressed he did not scorn me for having an IDE drive. And he did not tell me he buys DVD-RW drives by the dozen for his Dream Machines, which made me even happier!
My main concern was that everything was working perfectly fine not long ago – late November, if I remember, was when I used the burner the last time. And Nero often seemed to show the burner’s buffer as emptying before the main buffer, which led me to imagine it was not holding all the data. If this thing crashed now, I really would not be able to go to Seattle to complain.
After my facts shot down and walked over Justin’s theory, I took a wild guess: “Can it be because I have not defragmented since days long past?”. And he said “Of course, you goon!” I was really offended at that, because Goon is that thing inside the Black Omen in Chrono Trigger, the big fat yellow guys with wings that have that stupid grin on their faces and say “Hear ye, hear ye” before throwing an attack from their very dumb ears. I hate them. But since Justin is always right about computers, and he did not humilliate me by mentioning any dream machines with Power SCSI 16v Turbo DVD-RWs, I decided to overlook it. “And they are all FAT32, too.” He urged me to defrag, convert and reboot. “Do it right now!,” he said, “or I will hack into your little Asgaard and wipe out all your episodes of Chobits and your Romulan Dictionary and the pictures of Sailor Moon vintage 1997!”
There I went, then, eyes cast down, to find space and defragment all four partitions, then convert them to NTFS. The process ended at 5h AM, but I could not sleep any minute because I was scared of Justin. After everything was done, I tried burning a CD – and nothing happened. Justin failed.
Rather annoyed, and somewhat rebellious, I took my Ancienteth Booketh ofeth Windowseth Arteth ofeth Troubleshootineth and used the oldest trick in it: uninstalled the drivers for the burner and the IDE, and made WinXP recognize them again. It was only then that the real culprit came to light.
In the event where I replaced the Volcano 5 I had for a Volcano 9, where I lost 256 Mb of DDR RAM that is still not replaced, I also bought a new CD-ROM to replace a faulty one. Both are as generic as can be. So I physically removed the broken one, put the other in its place, and did not touch the drivers. WinXP said “Hey, you have a new piece of hardware here. Hold on, let me set it up for you.” and I thought everything was okay. It played audio CDs and ran data CDs.
Back to last night. I removed the drivers for CD-RW and IDE (and I forgot that when IDE is removed it takes HD and CD drivers with it), and rebooted. XP jumped on me: “Hey! Lots of new stuff! Let’s see, a VIA IDE controller! And a SeaGate hard drive! Wow! And look at that, an HP burner! And… ooohhh, look at this: this is the famous and rare LG CD-52 GPS Golden EMP of the Noble House of SCV. Let me set it up for you.”
And so it ended. After WinXP realized it was mistaken at first by calling my Noble LG CD-52 a generic drive, everything was back to normal and I burned a very hard to find PSX ISO in the usual 5 minutes. Perfect. It is now on its way to Minas Gerais (no relation to Minas Tirith and Minas Morgul), a late thank you for a favor done long ago. One debt paid, but the other is in US currency and this stupid left wing government is managing to put the exchange rate back into critical levels – and obviously is blaming the previous government for it, maneuver they will make use of in the next four years.
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