I recently tried to burn a dvd using premiere elements, I got error after error and no burn copy of the movie I created. I exported this movie to mpeg2 and tried to use NERO to durn this dvd, again the process gave me error after error. I updated all firmware and tried everything else I could think of to solve this problem.

I then got in touch with someone from Sony, the manufacturer of my drive(dru-710a). I was going back and forth with this person, via live chat, and he finally asked me how many dvd drives I had on my system. I told him 2 dirves and he tells me that is the problem. No system can function with 2 dvd drives on one computer. I kindly ask him to explain why this configuration worked for over 6 months and then all of the sudden it did not. He told me that he did not know why this worked.

The reason that I am so questioning this is because I have been burning dvds for some time now and everything has worked great. Now, out of the blue, it does not. If this were the case, not being able to have 2 dvd drives on one system, don't you think that my computer would have noticed a while ago, like when I first installed the new drive.

Anyways, can anyone tell me if this is the truth or not. If it is then I will deal. If not, can someone tell me how to configure my system to use both drives.

you should be able to have as many DVD Drives in your computer as you want. I have 3 in mine. The problem you are having might be something different.

From what I've been reading and hearing (I've got some troubles with my DVD burner as well, really weird ones), a DVD burner works best when it's configured as the master drive for that particular IDE controller. Don't ask me why, it doesn't make any sense to me, but that's what I've heard from the NEC support guy/gal.

Theoretically, you can have 24 DVD drives in your system (Every letter of the alphabet, minus the A: drive and C: drive).

I haven't seen a system like that, but massive CD servers I've seen have up to 14 externally.

Thanks for your help with my question. I had to speak to sony support and they still feel that I should only have one DVD drive on my computer. After hours of frustration with this whole deal, I had to clean up several gigs worth of data, uninstall programs and then of course re-install those same programs. Now everything seems to work. Oh yeah, my computer is setup just like before. Interesting!