I have been fighting problems encountered when trying to burn CDs and
DVDs on my Dell XPS Gen 4. During marathon calls to Dell support, I've
reinstalled drivers, drives, reseated cables, taken out registry
entries, rebooted a minimum of 100 times (maybe 100,000 - I've lost
count) , etc. I'm now able to burn CDs and DVDs, but I've had to
switch to Nero from the Dell-supplied burner software (SONIC RecordNow!
Plus) in order to do so.

During all that troubleshooting, I was using the SONIC software to
test. I noticed at one point that the drive names SONIC was offering
were not the real drive names, but were in fact corrupted versions of
those names. As a matter of fact, random characters in the names had
been changed by the alteration of a single bit in the ASCII character -
"SAMSUNG" became "SAMQULG", "R/RW" became "P/PW", "DVD" became "DTD"
etc. - how in the world could that happen? I chalked that up to buggy
SONIC software, until I looked at the drive names in the BIOS, where
they were also corrupted. At that point, it "felt" like hardware
(single bit drops/picks).

So question 1 is: Is it possible that SONIC could have caused those
names to corrupt, even down in BIOS? I kind of associate BIOS info
with actual hardware firmware data, not susceptible to bad software -
am I wrong in that assumption?

Once I saw those bad drive names, I then started poking around the
registry, and I found scads of entries containing the corrupted names.
This happened even ater I uninstalled the device (which had the bad
names in Device Manager, too). I was able to manually delete most of
them, but I got a message on some of the delete attempts: "Error while
deleting key" Here's one of the entries I can't delete:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Enum\I DE\CdRomSAMQULG_CD_P/PW_SU_050S...

Question 2 (a two-parter), then: Is there any danger in leaving the
corrupted registry entries as they are? If I need to get of those, how
can I do it?

Thanks for your input/help on this. Although I'm back in the burning
business, I'd just like to get a better feel for where the problems
truly lie.

david.f.jenkins@usa.net wrote:
> I have been fighting problems encountered when trying to burn CDs and
> DVDs on my Dell XPS Gen 4. During marathon calls to Dell support, I've
> reinstalled drivers, drives, reseated cables, taken out registry
> entries, rebooted a minimum of 100 times (maybe 100,000 - I've lost
> count) , etc. I'm now able to burn CDs and DVDs, but I've had to
> switch to Nero from the Dell-supplied burner software (SONIC RecordNow!
> Plus) in order to do so.
>
> During all that troubleshooting, I was using the SONIC software to
> test. I noticed at one point that the drive names SONIC was offering
> were not the real drive names, but were in fact corrupted versions of
> those names. As a matter of fact, random characters in the names had
> been changed by the alteration of a single bit in the ASCII character -
> "SAMSUNG" became "SAMQULG", "R/RW" became "P/PW", "DVD" became "DTD"
> etc. - how in the world could that happen? I chalked that up to buggy
> SONIC software, until I looked at the drive names in the BIOS, where
> they were also corrupted. At that point, it "felt" like hardware
> (single bit drops/picks).
>

<snip>

i have seen that many times...
and it was always traced to the ide being either defective
or not having a good connection.
unplug both ends and replug firmly...
it that does not solve the problem...replace the cable