DeadnightWarrior wrote on 2020-06-04, 14:07:
Tetrium wrote on 2020-06-03, 22:18:
They often don't even detect the discs, so sometimes they do detect the discs?
Yeah it's a bit random: for example when I was trying to install Windows XP using up to three different discs, a couple of times the system would boot and hang mid-installation, other times the it did not even detect that a disc was inserted.
Were the XP install discs burned ones or were they original media?
DeadnightWarrior wrote on 2020-06-04, 14:07:
Tetrium wrote on 2020-06-03, 22:18:
Have you tried these 4 drives in any of your other rigs? Have you tried any of your SATA optical drives in your A64 rig, if only to test if it would at least work?
I don't have other IDE capable rigs actually. As for the opposite, I did try a brand new SATA LG drive on the A64 but it was a bit tricky 'cause the mainboard has a very early iteration of SATA. Not the best of options, I'd say.
It can be very handy having plentiful spare parts laying around, if only so you have lots of parts you can swap to help eliminate the part that is causing an issue.
And it wouldn't even be the first time if 2 parts work by themselves but for whatever reason don't like each other (though I think the latter is unlikely to be the case in your case as you used 4 different optical drives by now).
Things you could try out (in a hypothetically optimal case) is to try out the optical drives on another motherboard, swap IDE cables, swap PSU, obviously change IDE channel, heck even check for an empty battery, demount from the case in case there is some weird short or whatever going on. It often doesn't even need to be an obvious problem, it might as well have been something that you/we missed.
But having a testing environment has helped me out plenty in the past. Of course once you have build dozens of rigs, you somehow get to a workflow which optimizes building computers.
But at any rate, it helps having some spare parts laying around if only so you can test (and because I've had a couple situations in which a single defective computer part ruined another previously good computer part and I don't want that to happen again 🤣).
Btw, try out your new SATE optical with some SATA2IDE converters and see if that will work on your IDE channel.
DeadnightWarrior wrote on 2020-06-04, 14:07:
Tetrium wrote on 2020-06-03, 22:18:
EDIT: You mention that the burned discs do work in the optical drive in which they were burned? Have you tried burning a disc with another optical burner and then having your IDE drives read those discs? Perhaps for some reason the older IDE drives are not liking what your current burner produces??
This might very well be the case. My daily rig has a fairly modern optical drive, purchased about three years ago. What I can try to do is burn the discs using dedicated softwares (CDBurnerXP, UltraISO, Nero, Burrn...) instead of Windows 10's built in function. And maybe trying the lowest possible write speed could help?
That's one thing you could try. Or perhaps even try to burn a disk using one of your IDE burners and see what happens (this will probably ruin one of your discs though, but if you happen to have plenty then why not?).
EDIT: Btw, don't completely rule out that it might actually be a PSU problem.
What PSU are you using in your older IDE rig and how old is it/how long has it been in use?
Could even be that the PSU is still healthy, but that it can't provide enough power to the system? It could explain why the rig seems to work fine when mostly in idle mode but starts having issues when it has to get to work.