It all started after I recovered my Windows 98 SE partition after a bad dual boot install of Fedora Core 3. The Fedora Core 3 partition manager nearly destroyed my Win98SE Partiotion (I can NOT loose this partition ever as I will not be able to reinstall Borland C++ Builder 5 Pro, so any suggestions about clean reinstalls of Win98SE are totally OUT OF THE QUESTION!!!!! Thank You!) After recovering the partition, I discovered crosslinked files (none of them reported as system files needed for ASPI or other core OS system files) and after the repair, I ended up installing Win98SE over (non clean: dirty install to keep the critical apps) and that got rid of alot of hangups and bugs. Ever since the dirty reinstall however, NONE of my CD burning programs (Nero & Roxio) find any burnable drives. It is like something is telling them that all my burner drives are just ordinairy CD-ROM drives. I have tried reinstalling the ASPI drivers with ForceASPI and the installer from Adaptec and extracting the original files from my Win98SE CD with "fsc.exe" but all to no availl. I even tried uninstalling/installing/reinstalling Nero and Roxio one at a time (by themselves.) The registry entries seem OK, they look exactly like what I have seen posted on other boards. I know it is a software problem because Fedora Core 3 (Linux) has no problem burning disks. HELP!
I just found the Nero InfoTool and it has been the only application thus far that reports my burner as CD-R/W capable in Windows.
Apparently, Linux is more fault tolerant with bad CD-R/W devices than Windows is. I discovered that the burner was bad only after I had taken it back to the store (it was a BENQ and it had only been a month old) and acquired a new one (Memorex.) The moral of the story is "don't trust Linux!"
