Who wants to guess what happened to my stupid computer

[crazydog]

Whoever guesses correctly (I don't even know the answer) wins nothing!
Here's what happened:
1) When I bought my two new hard drives, I had to buy a legacy -> SATA power cable in order to have a power cable long enough to reach an HDD and my Burner.
2) I bought a $2 cable from china *might be important*
3) I plugged in the dvd burner power with the adapter. NOTE: The other power cable on the connector is NOT connected to my boot drive (makes the problem more confusing).
4) Everything worked fine
5) I rebooted my computer today because of TF2 was acting like it was having the paged memory problem (crashing w/ no error messages, looping sound)
6) When I booted, it said there was a disk read error.
7) I booted to XP CD, ran scandisk, it stopped at 23% and said there were unrecoverable errors.
8) I was about to reboot with SeaTools to see if there was something wrong with the disk, but my dvd burner wouldn't open
9) My BIOS was reading the dvd burner's name as BzBzBzBzBzBzBzBzBzBzBzBzBzBzBzBzBzBzBzBzBzBzBzBzBzBzBzBz etc.
10) Powered off the system, removed power from dvd burner (remember: The other power connector on this cable is not attached to the boot drive)
11) Started computer, worked fine
12) I'm now going to turn it off again, plug the power back into the dvd burner and see if it works.

So who can figure out what happened? Was the dvd burner pulling too much power from the PSU? Here's what I have connected:
GeForce 7950GT
Core2Duo 1.8GHz
no PCI cards
3 SATA drives
1 PATA drive
DVD burne
2 case fans
Mouse
Keyboard
All on a 550 PSU with 16 amps on each of 2 12v rails.

If it wasn't a power problem, what the fuck happened? Why would removing power from my dvd burner fix a drive read error (if it wasn't the power)

EDIT:
Ok, I plugged the DVD burner back in and it's giving me the disk read error again. I guess I'll return that cable and just move my dvd drive down in my case. (Only downside is I have to find something that will cut aluminium to open another panel in the front of the case). I'm assuming it was the power cable I bought, but does anyone else have any ideas?

[TE | Hypo]

who makes the DVD burner?  what if its DOA out of the box?  can you pull it out and stick it on another machine to test it?

[lickmybarrell]

yea buy a new case or a longer sata cable or new power supply.

[crazydog]

The DVD burner isn't the problem. I've been using it since I built the computer. I just needed a longer cable because of my newer hard drives. I can move the drive lower so that it will fit. I just wanted to see if I didn't need to.

[MR|337]

The game crash you described sounds like a video/sound driver issue. Update them.

[crazydog]

of course! How could I be so stupid!

Cannot access offset of type string on string