External CD Burner Error

Problem: You may read this and think it's not much of a tip, but I've had this situation crop up on quite a few occasions. You're using an external CD burner connected via USB cabling. At any point during the burning process you may receive a STOP error and the burn aborts. Or, the burn will complete but when you try and view the CD contents it's either blank or returns another file error.

Possible Solution: Change the USB cable. Every time I have encountered this situation it has been the fault of a defective USB cable. Granted, there could certainly be other causes, but it seems the cables do take a beating. It's difficult to tell if it's defective from a visual inspection unless it's totally trashed. The easiest test is to substitute a known good cable. If the error persists, move on to software and system incompatibilities.