Topic: installing an NEC DVD drive

[T.J.]

yeah, i should clarify, i make multiple backups, but the main backup is the disc with everything on it for the night.

in addition to putting everything on one disc i also burn an audio copy on cdr. everntually i will get around to putting shows on the archive. that is another can of worms...

[T.J.]

yep, if you burn them as a data file you can still open them in cd wave and wavelab.  instead of having an audio file, you'll have a data file, just like the one that used to be on the pc hard drive, only it'll be stored on the dvd-r.

  getting a little confused. i am using Sonic to burn my dvd-r. i click on add files and add my wav files to burn. the files are listed as wav sounds. how can i burn as a data file instead of a wav? i have been searching through all the settings in sonic and i can't find any option which will write wav files as data. am i missing something here? i know i can compress using flac, which will be a data file. but like i said before i want to save my masters uncompressed. i feel like there should be a simple solution to this problem. any help is always appreciated guys. thanks...

[Ed.]

I've never used sonic before, but i know in nero you have the option of making a "data dvd" - I just do that and drag the wav's into the program and burn it.

[T.J.]

I've never used sonic before, but i know in nero you have the option of making a "data dvd" - I just do that and drag the wav's into the program and burn it.

i finally grabbed a copy of nero. f'in sweet. but i still have the same problem. i think i am going to try and reinstall the drive when i have time. i set the jumper to CS. this time i will set it to SLAVE.

[dnsacks]

tj, so you're still having the issue that you get skips when trying to play back wav files burned to a dvd. 

From your description above (you're burning wav and flac files to the same dvd), it sounds like you're burning data disks.  CAn you play flac files of the same songs off the dvd without skipping/distortion?

If so, what happens if you copy a wav file off of the dvd and onto a hard drive?  Does playing back the wav file from the hard drive cause skipping/distortion?

If no distortion on the file copied to a hard drive, perhaps it's simply a matter of your drive/computer being too slow to effectively read the wav file (more data per minute of music than a flac file) off the dvd disk for live playback. 

Another thought is whether your dvd drive is being accessed by windows in DMA mode (good) or PIO mode (bad).

[T.J.]

aight folks, i am revisting this thread again b/c i need to get this burner working. it may already be working, but i'm not sure. i reinstalled this driver and everything seems fine. it is set up as the "slave" drive and burns fine using nero. i am trying to burn both flac and wav files to dvd.

CAn you play flac files of the same songs off the dvd without skipping/distortion?

If so, what happens if you copy a wav file off of the dvd and onto a hard drive?  Does playing back the wav file from the hard drive cause skipping/distortion?

If no distortion on the file copied to a hard drive, perhaps it's simply a matter of your drive/computer being too slow to effectively read the wav file (more data per minute of music than a flac file) off the dvd disk for live playback. 

Another thought is whether your dvd drive is being accessed by windows in DMA mode (good) or PIO mode (bad).

i cannot play either flac or wav files from the burned dvd without skipping. however, when i copy the file from the dvd to the desktop it plays fine without any skipping. is this an indication that maybe the dvd's are burning fine and my ploblem is simply with playback? i've tried the burned dvd in both dvd players on my computer, haven't tried on another cpu.

if it is only a playback issue, how can i fix this problem?

i'm not sure if the dvd drive is being accessed by windows in DMA or PIO mode. how can i check this?

thanks guys.

[T.J.]

aight folks, i am revisting this thread again b/c i need to get this burner working. it may already be working, but i'm not sure. i reinstalled this driver and everything seems fine. it is set up as the "slave" drive and burns fine using nero. i am trying to burn both flac and wav files to dvd.

CAn you play flac files of the same songs off the dvd without skipping/distortion?

If so, what happens if you copy a wav file off of the dvd and onto a hard drive?  Does playing back the wav file from the hard drive cause skipping/distortion?

If no distortion on the file copied to a hard drive, perhaps it's simply a matter of your drive/computer being too slow to effectively read the wav file (more data per minute of music than a flac file) off the dvd disk for live playback. 

Another thought is whether your dvd drive is being accessed by windows in DMA mode (good) or PIO mode (bad).

i cannot play either flac or wav files from the burned dvd without skipping. however, when i copy the file from the dvd to the desktop it plays fine without any skipping. is this an indication that maybe the dvd's are burning fine and my ploblem is simply with playback? i've tried the burned dvd in both dvd players on my computer, haven't tried on another cpu.

if it is only a playback issue, how can i fix this problem?

i'm not sure if the dvd drive is being accessed by windows in DMA or PIO mode. how can i check this?

thanks guys.

fwiw i am certain the burner is burning properly b/c i brought a dvd i burned into my work computer and it plays fine. so how can i get the dvd drive on my computer to play it back? do i need more RAM/ROM soundcard, etc..

sorry for the uneducated questions. i really don't know much about this and can't find many resources.

[Ed.]

it seems a little odd that you have enough ram to burn the dvd, but not enough ram to play it from the dvd.

do you know how much ram you have installed?  and how fast do you burn the disc?  If you can whip out a burned disc in a few minutes, writiing at 8x or 16x, but when you play it back it skips, I'd say there's something wrong with the playback feature on the drive.

I dunno, I'm kind of scratching my head on this one.

[T.J.]

it seems a little odd that you have enough ram to burn the dvd, but not enough ram to play it from the dvd.

do you know how much ram you have installed?  and how fast do you burn the disc?  If you can whip out a burned disc in a few minutes, writiing at 8x or 16x, but when you play it back it skips, I'd say there's something wrong with the playback feature on the drive.

I dunno, I'm kind of scratching my head on this one.

thanks for the response ed +T

i'm not sure how much RAM i have installed b/c i'm at work. i can check when i get home. i recently burned two data dvd's (1 +R/1 -R) and one audio cdr using nero @ 8x. i can burn a dvd in a little under an hr. and a cdr in a couple minutes. none play without skipping on my computer using either disc drives. however they all playback fine on any other computer.

i then burned a cdr on my computer from the files on the burned dvd-r (which skips during playback). the cdr burns fine and plays without skips. this leads me to believe both disc drives burn properly but can't playback.
i'm scratching my head too. it has to be a simple problem, but i can't figure it out.

[kcmoejoe]

i'm not sure if the dvd drive is being accessed by windows in DMA or PIO mode. how can i check this?

this might help... http://winhlp.com/WxDMA.htm

[T.J.]

i'm not sure if the dvd drive is being accessed by windows in DMA or PIO mode. how can i check this?

this might help... http://winhlp.com/WxDMA.htm

awesome KC
this looks like it could be a solution:

Possible causes for falling back to PIO mode
The most frequent use why a CD or DVD port falls back to PIO mode is a scratched or otherwise unreadable CD or DVD.

However, there are a few reasons why a computer may use PIO instead of DMA, particularly when it's the hard disk port that falls back, not a CD/DVD drive port. For example, David Duberman reported in 2005 that some Dell computers have DMA disabled in their BIOS by default for the second hard disk. So it is a good idea to check the BIOS settings first.
Other reasons can show up in the event log, so check this first and see if you can find repeated Atapi errors recorded. If so, you likely have a hardware defect. You can use the procedure described below, but your computer will probably fall back to PIO mode again and again, until you solve the underlying problem, which may be located inside the device, on the motherboard, or in the IDE data cable and its connectors.

first i'm going to check this when i get home from work.
thank you very much +T

[T.J.]

OKAY........................
it turns out my Secondary IDE Channel was set to PIO mode. i was able to successfully set the transfer mode back to Ultra DMA Mode 2 for Device 0 (which i believe is the dvd drive i have installed.) device 1 is still set to PIO mode. but correct me if i'm wrong but this shouldn't matter b/c i only have one device connected to the Secondary IDE Channel. right?

my Primary IDE Channel Device 0(which i believe is the cdr drive that's functioning properly) is set to Ultra DMA Mode 5. it says that Device 1 is not applicable.

Regardless...the DVD drive STILL skips during playback!!! ahhh

do you know how much ram you have installed? 

fwiw i have 512 MB of RAM installed on the CPU

i can't believe i can't this thing working properly.



maybe i can get some help from the feline 

[kcmoejoe]

ok, .... first your Primary IDE channel is your Hard Drive (set to DMA mode) thats good.

Your Secondary IDE channel is your CDR and DVD drives, you have them piggybacked on the cable as master and slave right ?  my guess is Device 0 (master) would be your original CDR drive (set to DMA)
and the Device 1 (slave) has got to be your DVD drive that you need to somehow get in DMA mode.

Did you try to change it by going to My Computer > Properties > Hardware > Device Manager > IDE controllers >Secondary channel > Advanced > change to DMA mode  ?

I feel your pain, I went through this with a computer years ago, and it was hell getting it to work.
and then the next drive I bought had no problems installing and setting itself automatically to DMA.

good luck!

[T.J.]

ok, .... first your Primary IDE channel is your Hard Drive (set to DMA mode) thats good.

Your Secondary IDE channel is your CDR and DVD drives, you have them piggybacked on the cable as master and slave right ?  my guess is Device 0 (master) would be your original CDR drive (set to DMA)
and the Device 1 (slave) has got to be your DVD drive that you need to somehow get in DMA mode.

Did you try to change it by going to My Computer > Properties > Hardware > Device Manager > IDE controllers >Secondary channel > Advanced > change to DMA mode  ?

I feel your pain, I went through this with a computer years ago, and it was hell getting it to work.
and then the next drive I bought had no problems installing and setting itself automatically to DMA.

good luck!

this all makes sense. i thought the Primary IDE was my CDR drive. but my CDR drive is actually Device 0 one the Secondary IDE (which is working properly and set to DMA. the DVD drive is definitely piggybacked on the Secondary IDE as Device 1. I tried going to My Computer > Properties > Hardware > Device Manager > IDE controllers >Secondary channel > Advanced > change to DMA mode. the box for Device 1 is grey, not allowing me to switch the Current Transfer Mode from PIO to DMA. the Transfer Mode box above that is set to "DMA if Available."

Device 0 was set to PIO last night, too. i was able to change it back to DMA mode by following these steps:

Run REGEDIT. Go to the following key:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}

It has subkeys like 0000, 0001, 0002, etc. Normally 0001 is the primary IDE channel, 0002 the secondary, but other numbers can occur under certain circumstances. You have to go through these subkeys and check the DriverDesc value until you find the proper IDE channel.

Delete MasterIdDataChecksum or SlaveIdDataChecksum, depending on whether the device in question is attached as master or slave, but it can't actually hurt to delete both. Reboot. The drive DMA capabilities will be redetected.

i deleted both IdDataChecksum's and fixed Device 0, however it didn't fix Device 1. i'm wondering if i should take the next step:

if this doesn't work, check also the dword value MasterDeviceTimingModeAllowed, whose default value is hex 0xFFFFFFFF. If you have a much smaller value, you can try to set it back to its default and reboot for a test.

or

It's three keys that work together:

MasterDeviceTimingMode
UserMasterDeviceTimingModeAllowed
MasterDeviceTimingModeAllowed

MasterDeviceTimingMode:

Queried by the drive. Each bit means a permitted transfer mode that the device is capable of. Somewhere at MS some of these bits can be looked up.

UserMasterDeviceTimingModeAllowed:

Has the same structure as MasterDeviceTimingMode and has the bit values the user configures in Device Manager. 0xffffffff allows all modes that are set in MasterDeviceTimingMode as well.

MasterDeviceTimingModeAllowed:

This entry is the problem child. Normally not present in XP, it is created as a reaction to errors. This entry has absolute priority.

These parameters also exist for the slave drive as SlaveDeviceTimingMode, etc.

[kcmoejoe]

yes you could try that next step just remember that messing around in the REGEDIT can cause big problems if you delete or change the wrong thing (be careful to follow the instructions), or use the alternative, that one user said fixed his by simply uninstalling the secondary channel in device manager, rebooting, and letting windows re-install the secondary channel.

Alternative Method—Uninstalling the Port
1. Uninstall the secondary IDE port
To do that, open Device Manager as follows. Right-click on My Computer, select Properties, click on the Hardware tag, click on the Device Manager button, click on the plus sign to the left of IDE ATA/ATAPI Controller, right-click on Secondary IDE Channel, click on Uninstall. Deactivating is not enough.

Reboot to make the changes active and permanent.

After booting Windows will automatically reinstall the IDE channel and the DVD (or CD) drive. This Plug-n-Play process can take a little while, so give it a minute after the boot process finishes.