Turning Off Auto-Insert Notification in Windows 95/98
Most Windows-based recording software recommends turning off
Auto-Insert Notification. Having this on can interfere with closing sessions or even just
inserting discs into the drive. You can disable it by opening the "System" icon
in the Control Panel, and Selecting "Device Manager". For each item under
CD-ROM, select the device, click on the "Settings" tab, and make sure the
"Auto Insert Notification" checkbox is unchecked. [With my vanilla Win95 setup,
I got SCSI errors when AIN was off for my CD-R but on for my CD-ROM, even if the CD-ROM
drive wasn't in use at the time.]
Sidebar: the trouble with Auto Insert Notification is that
it periodically attempts to find a valid disc in the CD recorder. A blank disc isn't very
interesting to Windows, so nothing happens. When the table of contents is written to the
disc, it suddenly becomes interesting; and if Autorun or Autoplay are enabled, enough
activity is generated by Windows' attempts to read the disc that the write fails.
Because it only affects CDs with actual data being written
to them, a test write won't end in failure. It can be very frustrating to have 100%
success with test writes and 100% failures with actual writes! With disc-at-once
recording, the process will abort very near the start of recording, probably leaving an
empty but useless disc. With track-at-once recording, it will fail at the end, and you may
still be able to finalize the disc. Audio CDs will most likely work fine even if
interrupted at the end of the write process.
IMPORTANT: if you are using DirectCD for
Windows, you must have AIN turned *on*, or some things won't work quite right. The most
obvious failure mode is that long filenames aren't shown, but some reports indicate that
data on the disc can get trashed as well. This can make life interesting if you're also
using a conventional writing application, unless the application is good about turning AIN
off before writing. The other Windows applications currently sold by Adaptec (notably Easy
CD Creator) will automatically disable Auto-Insert Notification when appropriate and
re-enable it afterward.
Credits: This is an edited version of a message
originally written by "PSX Pirate" on the PSX Copy Discussion Forum
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