I've been having problems with my system rebooting at random times
recently. I'm not really sure, but it seems to be connected to the CD-RW
drive I installed a few weeks ago. The unit is an Acer CRW-6206A recently
on sale at CompUSA. The unit is currently disconnected and no reboots have
happened ... yet (it's a bit too soon to be definite about this since it's
only been about a hour so far.) This unit was originally connected as slave
on the secondary IDE port with a Digital 40X standard IDE CD-ROM as master
(this is the installation recommended by Acer's documentation.) The ribbon
cable is connected with the end connector to the slave drive (I don't know
if this makes any difference, the picture in the manual shows it connected
to the master drive.) These random reboots happen both in Win98 and WinNT,
although NT sometimes gives me a 'Blue Screen of Death' with various error
messages.

One thing the documentation references is PIO mode. This isn't something
I'm really familiar with. From the documentation:

While setting up your hardware devices, it is recommendable that you
connect the fast device in the master position and the slow one in the
slave mode.

<Since the CD-ROM is 40X and the CD-RW is 2X write and 6X read, I was
making this assumption on original installation.>

For example, you have a CRW-6206A/V runs in PIO mode 4(faster), and a
CD-ROM only runs in PIO Mode 3 (slower), we suggest you connect your CD-ROM
drive on the secondary slave and CRW-6206A on the secondary master.

<Looks like the CD-RW runs in PIO Mode 4. I checked the docs for the CD-ROM
and under the Disc Type heading, it says 'CD-ROM/XA (mode 2, form 1 and
form 2)' along with other disk types. Is this the same as PIO Mode? Is this
what's causing my random reboots? I won't reconfigure my CDs yet until I
see if this is REALLY what's causing the problem. I'd be more likely to
believe this would affect drive access speed more than having a effect on
the stability of the OS.>

For the record, this system is an IBM P166+ processor (with a decent fan)
on an Intel i430VX motherboard, 64MB EDO RAM, 2 hard drives on IDE1, and a
Zip disk (and sometimes a Sparq drive - currently disconnected) connected
to the IDE port on the Soundblaster SB32PnP sound card. All this is in a
new case with a 250 watt power supply. All these reboots have played havoc
with my Sparq drive - I've been getting way too many bad sectors on the
disks to be comfortable (although it's not ALL related to the reboots which
is why I added the CD-RW.)
=======================================================================
| labrat 'at' pobox 'dot' com | Just because you're paranoid doesn't  |
|                             | mean they're not out to get you       |
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