right,i have a newish pc athlon 1800, asus board266 believe 512ddr, windows xp home.preloaded. bought a new tdk cyclone 48/24/48.now i already have a 32x liteon and lighton163 dvd. as i have no idea how to set up took to my local pc shop. now on the secondary ide have master liteon dvd, slave liteon 32x,he says no matter which is slave or master. now my question is this my new tdk is on the primary ide as master, hd slave,so he says that as it is not on the same ide chn will work on the fly at 48x .right i have 40x verbatums and the tdk has the buffer under run working flat out,in nero from 100 to 0 and at bottom 98to 22%. should the tdk on the primary as master and the liteon dvd163 secondary master work on the fly or not. i believe the pc has other problems as when burning the mouse pointer hardly moves and the pc performs no other funchions,it was like this before when i had the liteon writer burning. both dmas are enabled although in bios says primary master tdk auto, p10 mode 4, ultra mode2,primary slave maxtorhd, p10mode 4, ultradma mode5.any thoughts.colin

I have
primary master 40 GB maxtor 7200 rpm
primary slave 80 GB IBM 120/Deskstar
secondary master CDRW liteon 40/12/48
secondary slave liteon DVD 163

I can copy on the fly no problems at all, also if you put a cd/cdrw etc drive on the primary ide cable won't that slow your hard drive down?
there are 2 thoughts, 1 have them on separate ide cables and the other is to not. Since I have never had a problem with the above setup I'm content to let it continue.

BTW the cdrw had to be master other wise the pc wouldn't recognise it.

Your setup os ample for OTF burning.

Your main HDD being primary slave seems an odd choice but this goes against normal convention, its not technically wrong.

You say DMA is enabled, it doesn't sound like it if the mouse stops responding and the system slows.

UDMA 5 is correct for the HDD, this equates to the ATA100 specs of the drive.

Just check that DMA is fully enabled for ALL devices:

Right Click on MY Computer
select PROPERTIES

select HARDWARE
select DEVICE MANAGER

Expand IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers

selct Primary and secondary, ADVANCED in turn and make sure DMA if available is selcted and the greyed box (current Transfer Mode) states ULTRA DMA MODE


Other things to check are the ASPI layer, this has been covered many times, search the forum for ASPI, all the info on installing it is there.

Lastly I would close down all running APPS from the system tray (near the clock) and try again.

For info try Nero Tools, CD SPEED just to check your drive can run the verbs at a decent speed

It is correct that the drives being on different IDE channels should work okay. If they were on the same channel they would share the same cable. Data needs to be READ and WRITTEN when burning on the fly.
If the same cable is used it can only do one thing at once i.e it can either READ or WRITE but not both.
If they are on different channels then it can do both at the same time (in theory).