Dual cd burners

I had access to an extra cd burner the other day and boy did I put it to good use! I was able to burn 25 cds in a little over an hour. The thing is that each one of those 25 was a different cd. Here is how I did it:

First I unplugged my pc and removed my two hard drives and my existing burner and placed them on my desk next to my pc.

Next I removed the new burner from its box and put it next to the rest of the drives on the desk.

I then made both hard drives master and both burners slave (cable select probably would have worked but I didn't want to waste time with trial and error).

After that I connected one hard drive / burner pair to one the primary IDE channel and the other pair to the secondary IDE channel.

I booted the pc and made a note of what the drives names were in the bios (this is important because you want to make sure you stick to the IDE channels the drives are on).

Once in windows I moved half of the stuff I wanted to burn onto one physical drive (make sure your not simply using two partitions of one drive but rather one of the two physical hard drives connected) and half onto the other physical drive.

Note: In Windows XP you can tell what physical hard drive each drive letter is matched to via the Disk Management plugin in the Computer Management console (Control panel -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management -> Storage -> Disk Management).

I then opened two copies of Nero and placed them side by side. Using the notes I took down from the bios and from the Disk Management console I took care to only drag files from the hard drive on the same IDE channel as the burner I was going to use with that copy of Nero.

After I loaded both compilations with files I started each copy of Nero independently and when Nero asked which burner to use I chose the one that matched up with the hard disk I had dragged the files from in that copy of Nero.

If care is taken you can get each IDE channel going simultaneously and burn at 52x with both drives.

If you have trouble check to make sure you are keeping both IDE channels separated and that you are not burning files from a hard drive on the primary IDE channel with a burner on the secondary IDE channel.

If you are still having problems try and burn at slower speeds and defrag both of your hard disks.

In the event that you have burners with mismatched speeds connect the fastest burner to the fastest hard drive on the primary IDE channel. For some reason (maybe this is not the case with today’s motherboards) the primary channel is usually faster than the secondary channel.

 

Here is a screen capture of the two copies of Nero side by side:

+click to enlarge

 

htmlArea

My most recent experiments have been revolving around a project called htmlarea. It seems that it was started by a company called interactivetools originally and now by a great developer named Mihai Bazon has produced a cross platform version that works in both Mozilla based browsers (Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape) and IE.

I am currently trying to introduce source highlighting into version 3 of html area so that it can be used as my primary xhtml authoring tool when I am away and unable to access my favorite (offline) editors.

 

Check back for more updates soon!