I have been installing everything that I have laying around to see what will and what won't for my setup and longhorn keeps switching what it sees .I will load in a cd into the burner and wait for LH to detect it and then open it up and if it is an app that will I then install and see if it works, after 3 or for cd's it stops seeing the drive and I have to put cd's in the DVD rom to be detected, 2or 3 and then it switches back to the burner. Has anyone else had a similar problem is there a work around or a solution

Can you please clarify I can't really understand your problem.

There must be aproblem with your IDE cables or ( not likely ) controller. I faced this problem in a customers PC. Try bying new cables. Propably will solve your problem

He's right your patch cables inside the computer may be coming loss or may just be old altogether. Try disconnecting them and reconnecting them. Boot your computer back up and see what happens...

My dvd rom and my cd burner are on the same cable ,DVD master, CD Burner slave.I took the suggestion and reseated the cable .I was simply installing everything that I have laying around to see what would and what wouldn't work in LongHorn 4051,so I would put a disk in and wait for the comp to detect it then go in and see what was on it (mostly burnt discs) and then try to install it if it was a windows program or game.What was happening was that after about four discs the computer wouldn't see anything in the burner and when I put the disc in the dvdrom it would see it so I would keep putting discs in the dvd and after a few the comp wouldn't see them and I would have to put them in the burner and it would see the discs again for a while,back and forth for about 30 discs. The cable is a new one but that doesn't mean much ,and I do man handle the comp quite a bit putting stuff in and takeing stuff out,the reason I posted about it was just to see if maybe it had happened to some one else and may have a remedy for it.Is there a way of getting directX 9b installed, I saw one thread with a way but I couldn't figure out what they were saying exactly.I have tweaked it ,gotten rid of the eye candy and use it pretty much as number one.

Have you checked the Slave/Master jumper cable on your 2 drives? It is possibile that they are both set to Master or Slave, which could cause problems when the drive is attempting to read.

Thanks for the reply ,they are both up and running at this time I am not presently loading in disc after disc, so the system isn't being strained at all,The settings are all as they should be and it is not presenting any inconveniance to me, so as long as it behaves itself I won't give it a second thought.Thanks for your attention.

I don't have a dvd drive, but my cd burner is doing about what you said yours was doing... I was cleaning the office, and came across some cd's that I could tell had something on them (nothing written on them ... imagine that!), but sometimes when I would try to check them it would say something like 17 files, but they were all 0 mb.... I am going to delete the drive and reboot to see if it will install again with better results... I did download real player, and maybe there is a problem with it trying to take the cd player's defaults...

I think that directx9.0b is already installed in LH. I tried the dxdiag command and responded that directx9.0b is running.

That rings a bell ginogsm, i am sure another member brought this up before, and there should be a post here about it. Have a look in the tweaking and tips area, it might be there.