My 5-year-old XP system came with a DVD-ROM installed. I added a DVR-RW to the other slot, and both worked rather well.

When the original drive failed, I replaced it with another DVD-RW, and since then, things have been touchy. I can usually get one of the burners to work, but there are false starts. Sometimes I can't read a CD in either drive, or I can only after a long wait.

Are there any known problems in having two DVD burners on one system? (One really doesn't have much choice, as finding new CD drives or DVD-ROM drives isn't easy, and they'd probably cost as much as a DVD-RW if you did.) I suspect that a lot of software may be confused. Do I have to do sometrhing to designate one of the drives as read only?

P.S.: I'm not doing anything extreme like trying to write two discs at once. The only advantage I see to having two is redundancy. I'm pretty sure that both optical drives are on the same IDE cable. Given the physical layout, I'm not sure that I could vary this aspect.

There should be no issue.

Make sure the jumpers are correct. Either set Master / slave or perhaps better choose Cable Select on both drives.

Also if your IDE ribbon is only 40 wire try an 80 wire.

Thanks. I'll check on those matters.