Went round to a mates the other day to help him out with his PC. I'm no real expert but I can find my way round. He bought this PC of someone he did some work for. The guy has left quite a lot of bits on it and I just need some pointers. Questions follow:

1. What is SCSI (I have a very vague idea)?

2. Explorer shows 4 hard drives. 1 SCSI and the other 3 I guess are one physical drive. I guess the only way to tell is to get the box open y/n?

3. What benefit if any does the SCSI drive give.

4. I was going to install some CD burning software, but the CD Rom drives wouldn't read my discs. Any idea why this may be? They work fine on mine. I had suggested rebuilding the machine, but if I can't read discs there seems little point.

Any help appreciated.

Dave

Herep

Hope it helps

Si

It's a means of connecting different types of drive together that has been around in various forms for about 15 years.
"SCSI (pronounced SKUH-zee and sometimes colloquially known as "scuzzy"), the Small Computer System Interface, is a set of ANSI standard electronic interfaces that allow personal computers to communicate with peripheral hardware such as disk drives, tape drives, CD-ROM drives, printers, and scanners faster and more flexibly than previous interfaces. Developed at Apple Computer and still used in the Macintosh, the present set of SCSIs are parallel interfaces. SCSI ports continue to be built into many personal computers today and are supported by all major operating systems. " From SearchStorage.com.

Depends. Watch the POST screen(s) when the machine starts up. It should display a list of the hard disks it's found. Opening the box will conclusively proove what is present. :)

Depends on the age of the SCSI card. If's an old one, not much compared with modern IDE. Check that link above for various performance specs.

The CDs you were trying to read, where they originals or home burnt? Can these CDs be read in other machines? Sounds like a physical alignment is out on one of the machines.

home burnt by someone else, but read fine on my pc.

Thx for the help guys, much appreciated.

Dave

Older slow CD drives had problems reading many CDRs, 80 min ones and CDRWs can be even more problematic on older drives. Can the drive read a selection of "original" CDs?
Some of the early 16x drives had problems, faster than this and it is usually OK.

ahhhh played music cds fine.

If you've got a spare hour, check out the CD-R FAQ....