please forgive me if i say somehting wrong, i will explain as best as i can:

ok today i got a new tower, the thermaltake Xaser III V2420 AU so i could finally add an extra HD and DVD burner thats been chillin in the wrapper for a while. My problem is the DVD burner slows my comp down to the point of making it reboot itself, and im pretty sure its cuz its set for UDMA 2 (it says that on bootup while all other IDE devices are at "5" ), i know raising that number was the fix for my cd r/rw burner which at first took 18 mins to burn a cd at a low udma number to 3.5 minutes when at "udma 5". The dvd burner is attached to a IDE on a ATA contoller card and not on the MB so i cant seem to change to udma settings. The manual for the ATA card doesnt say how to access the bios. am i on the right track?

the dvd burner is a LITEON DVD+/-R/+/-RW 4X
the ATA controller is a PROMISE Ultra ATA/133 (4 device controller)
im running on a Abit MB with a 1.4 Athlon and 768 Mb DDR

any sugguestions please! thank you!

First of all the ATA controller card must have a chip that supports the desired UDMA setting. IE if you want ATA-5 it must support ATA 100. If your card does so and you can get into safe mode on the pc (what os?) you can set the desired UDMA setting in the properties for the device using the device mananger (win2k and above).

What program are you using to burn the discs?

Looks like that is the best advice.

If you want, try the burner on an onboard controller, and see how it works too.

sorry forgot to mention, running win 2000. i was using Nero 6. im pretty sure it supports ATA 100

Make sure that you are not running it as a slave off the hard drive.

its on CS and attached to master position on the cable.

Well, I figured you had that in check. Just...stating the obvious things...

check out techimo.com the forums there should get this diagnosed and fixed in like less than a day. (those people there are freaking compgurus, they do this stuff for a living. Seriously)

I would try it on an onboard controller port and see what it dose. if the card supports ATA 133 is supports ATA 100 and ATA 66 ect, ect. I doubt it would be jumpers on the card but you never know.. You also may want to switch the drive to the MS setting instead of CS just to see if it dose somthing. (check also and see if you bent any pins when putting the cable in. I did that once on a hard drive and the comp would start loading win then stop. took a wile to figure that out..)

Take the burner off CS and set it to Master on it'* own channel if possible.

Try it both on the controller card, and using the onboard IDE of the motherboard.