[GordonF]

Even MTU warns that HP et al haven't tested their CD writers for CD+G compatibility our of their factory. So if none of these other ideas work, you may have to replace that drive and TEST the replacement drive.

I have a HP 9210e which is the same class of drive except in SCSI. It should be the same mechanism as your 9300i with few variations. I also believe the 9300i supports ATA bus mastering. With that in mind...

Update your ATA driver set to one that supports bus mastering (mistakenly referred to as "DMA" but DMA is really a holdover from the ISA bus). In theory your Win98 factory installation from eMachines should have this already but check with eMachines for an update. These guys have a picky little driver set unique to their machines and generic drivers from Intel or whoever makes the motherboard chipset might not work. A third party PCI to ATA adapter like the ones made by Promise Technology might solve your problem too.

Once you updated the driver or have ensured it supports bus mastering, go into Device Manager and turn on the DMA checkmark for the HP 9300i device in its Properties sheet. If you have other devices on the same IDE channel as the 9300i, ensure they also support bus mastering. If you find the 9300i and the hard drive are on the same IDE channel you really should separate them. I usually put hard drives on the first channel and ATAPI devices (CD and LS-120 for instance) on the other.

This bus mastering stuff reduces CPU time used when accessing the CD writer both for reads and writes, and reduces the risk of blowing any CD-R burning in progress by something as stupid as moving the mouse. This was why I chose the 9200 SCSI and a good bus mastering SCSI adapter instead of the 9300 ATAPI drive.

Clean the CD Writer before trying to read the disks or play them. Any Audio CD player lens cleaner will work, dry or wet, if you use the CD Player applet and treat the drive just like an audio CD player.

You already know about turning off auto-insert notification, etc but check that to make sure some other CD writer software hadn't re-enabled it.

Finally, you just may have a bad drive. I was fortunate that my PC vendor let me test this 9210 SCSI before buying it. I think MTU said HP drives had a two in five chance of failing even if the factory says they're OK, simply because they don't test for CD+G.