Hi..I am new to this site and hopethat I present this request for help appropriately. I have recently bought a pioneer dvr-109 dual layer dvd burner and installed it in my pc (Dell 4600 running windows xp)...set it as a slave and it is running on a separate ide to the motherboard but cannot get the burner to operate...keeps crashing the pc and will not burn any projects...nero states that it has completed thetask but thedisc is empty..prior to this also had occasional problems with my d drive that if there was a disc in it this would cause system to crash until disc was removed...have rebooted twice...have updated drivers but all to no avail. Anyone have any ideas what I could try next?

What is on the chain with the Pioneer? Anything?

Theprimary is thecd rom that came with the system, a dell model - nothing else on the chain. There wqas previously thedell installed dvd burner that worked fine - I replaced this with the new model. Not in same chain as motherboard

Ok, The CDRom is on the Same cable (Chain) as the Pioneer or not? If the pioneer is buy itself, only device on that cable, it needs to be master. As a rule, I always put devices that both send and received data (HDD and CD/DVD burners) as the master on any IDE Cable.

Same chain...set as slave....... master is d drive...cd/dvd rom

Move the Pioneer to Master and the CD/DVD Rom drive to Slave.

I'm pretty certain you need Nero 6 for the Pioneer 108 and above to operate. When you go to create a disc does it try to save an image file?

yes it does go to save an image...and I have nero 6

I have a Pioneer 108 and when I tried with Nero 5 it kept trying to save an image (it's not supposed to do this, means it's not recognising the drive) but I got Nero 6 (with SmartStart) and it automatically recognised the drive. So I'm not sure if this is a driver problem or a connection problem?

I will try deleting and reinstalling nero and see what happens...thanks for the tip