Topic: DVD drive problems?

[Swampy]

No, I cant copy directly, thats just ONE of the many things that doesn work (the only thing the drives WILL do is burn audio from the hd, and copy data from discs to HD, nothing else. No playing of CDs or DVDs, no burning of DVDs, no copying ect...) I dont think that there are many people the rip everything to their hd and then burn when it comes to trades, its just impractical IMO.

[dnsacks]

huh --

1) have you confirmed the dma setting for the dvd drive (to be sure it's set to Ultra dma) --

2) what OS are you running?  Have you performed a clean re-install of your OS in the past year or so?

If you've been running on the same install of windows for a while, you could have some corrupted drivers/conflicts that are causing this problem -- a clean re-install could help this (and will likely significantly increase your computer's speed).   The dma setting is crucial as it seems that all your problems are stemming from the computer not being able to read or write data from/to the drive fast enough.  A drive not using dma (direct memory access) will run a lot slower than a drive that is using dma.  One way to try and fix this is to "uninstall" the drive, reboot the pc and let windows automatically reinstall the drive. 

Re copying cds -- It takes me under 5 minutes to rip a cd to my hard drive using eac and under 3 minutes to burn using my dvd burner.  By doing this I'm confident that the cd I'm sending off in trade is a faithful clone/copy of the disk in my collection.  Were I not to do this, there's a very real chance that I'll introduce an audible flaw into the copy I send off.  This flaw will continue to propogate in all of the copies that may be made of the disk I copied.  Since cd trading is all about trading copies of copies of copies of copies of copies of originals and the 30th copy of the 30th copy may well become the seed for a huge bittorrent, etc. it seems to me that we should all do whatever is reasonably practical to assure the integrity of the copies we make for others.  Burning disks on the fly without using programs like EAC that verify accuracy of the data extracted from audio cds, is NOT, imho, a reasonable method of protecting the integrity of the music we've recorded/collected.

[Swampy]

 Windows XP. There has been a clean reinstall... Didn't change anything, its running on DMA... Im just way past trying to understand this now...

[Nick in Edinboro]

Did you use the IDE cable supplied with your drive Alex?

You should be using an Ultra IDE cable, and while a standard IDE cable will fit the throughput of the cable will be much less than it should be:


The one on top with thinner wires is what your shooting for, the one with fatter wires is an older IDE cable.

Just a thought.