Well an update to this thread for anyone interested. I finally got around to testing the drive this morning and it passed the hardware test which surprised me but after that I kept getting a secondary IDE controller problem in Windows and it wouldn't see the drive. After hours of troubleshooting the problem it turned out to be a bad IDE cable. I replaced the cable and decided to try burning some MP3s again, and low and behold. It burned them. So now I like my Plextor drive