I gave up trying to make the Gigabyte DVD work and lashed out and bought a new DVD writer, an ASUS DRW-1608P. No drivers come with the hardware, as the documentation says that Win all versions will find the required drivers.
Put it in, Windows tells me new hardware found... and, just like the Gigabyte DVD writer, WinXP finds a 'CD ROM' with a garbled name, (in this case, A U D W)1208P ), installs it, but it will not read from it. When I put a Cd into the drive, it spins up, lights up, but says it cannot read from the drive as it is corrupted.
So, since two totally different DVD writers have behaved in pretty much the same way, it would seem a safe bet that I have something amiss in my setup, either hardware or software.
I also run a CD rom as slave on the same cable and it works fine. I have tried removing it, so that the DVD is the only device on the cable, to no effect, and have tried switching the jumper on the DVD writer from Master to Cable Select. Same result in all cases.
Does anyone have any ideas on which way I should go with this? I'm running WinXP Pro on an ASUS P4P 800E motherboard, AVG antivirus and Zone Alarm Pro. (Could either of those two programs be the the problem?)