Hello all.

I've a dual boot XP/RH9 system selected via GRUB. Recently I found that opening and reclosing the media draw on a Pioneer A06 DVD rewriter (secondary master) would cause an abnormal reboot. The Acer DVD player also on the machine causes no such error.

OK so I need to change the Pioneer DVD rewriter. Now the fun begins...

If I remove the Pioneer DVD rewriter the system won't boot. It won't even get as far as trying to boot from a floppy (set as 1st boot device in the BIOS). It just hangs with a black screen and the power LED flashing.

I've tried to amend the BIOS of the Asus A7N8X-VM motherboard:
Setting the Acer to secondary master, Pioneer to secondary slave.
Removing DVD players from the boot options.
Setting the Pioneer as 'Not Installed'.

In all cases the system goes to GRUB and then boots normally if the Pioneer is installed but fails if I remove the DVD rewriter.

Puzzled.

Any thoughts?

Have you trying setting all drives in the BIOS to Auto?

Yes, indeed. Auto detection of all primary/secondary master/slave drives was how I initially set the system up.

Turns out that it was a PSU problem.