I can burn CD's now, yay, but have a million questions...

[Rabbi]

>OK, I am guessing that the bottleneck is the A1200's built-in IDE interface?

Exactly!  The way to resolve this issue is to purchase & install this piece of h/w: Elbox FastATA 1200 MK-III controller.  This sped up my CD burning by a factor of 2, effectively just slightly more than halving my burn time.  Mind you, the HD that's attached to it must be at least PIO-4 capable.

As far as your LED light on almost constantly, I'm clueless on that one.

>Also, anyone know if it's possible to have MakeCD burn say just a few directories to a cd, rather than the whole partition? Most of my partitions are too big to fit on one CD..

Sorry, the only way that I know how is that you must state which directory to find the data in.  You will have to burn a multisession CD using smaller directories each until you've filled up your CD or you'll just have to create a new folder that'll be no more than 700MB in length that you'll copy all the folders & data to that you want to back-up onto the CD in one complete burn session.  I use MakeCD's Tracks folder for that as my default data folder.

[Rabbi]

They make a plug-in for the Z-IV slot.  There's no other way around it.  Once you do it, you'll be glad you did.  I didn't like the fact that you must permanently remove the RF shielding, though, nor the fact that you could never use the HD cradle, as this add-on interferes with both items.  I've got a thick piece of cardboard on the bottoms of my 2 2.5" HDs wrapped around with electrical tape so that it won't short out either the A1200 or the HD.  My A1200 is still in the original desktop shell.

Given the size that your HD is that you descibe in your first posting, I'm 100% sure that it's at least a PIO-5, if not a PIO-6 type.

If you feel nervous about doing it yourself, I can come up there sometime on a Sunday & perform the surgery myself, for free.  I worked up in Madison last year & was commuting 2½ hours each way every work day for the first month of the contract.  Whereabouts in the Badger do you live?  You can write me at my e-mail account listed in my profile, if you want to.