Help, unable to burn DVDs anymore

CWILL1906 · Newbie Joined: 21 Jun 2005 Posts: 4

Hello, I am new to this so I apologize for being long winded or for any errors I make in this post but your help will be greatly appreciated. I have been using an Iomega External DVD writer and DVD-Cloner 2.40 software to back up my DVD collection for the past few months with no problems. However lately, my system freezes when I try to use the program to burn a disk. I can initialize the software and then set it up how-to-burn just fine. But when I select the OK to burn, it runs until it reached 5% of reading and then freezes my system. I have made sure no other program is being run during this time by going into Control-Alt-Delete and stopping all applications and start-ups that may interfere. By doing this I have also seen that the CPU memory usage varies b/n 1% and possibly 5% while the program is initialized but not burning. As soon as it begins to burn, it jumps to 100% and freezes. I had given up and reformatted my hard drive. Then proceeded to download the software of the company’s web site again however the problem remains. I have also tried reading the disk to the hard drive but the system will still freeze up as soon as it hits 5% of reading. After researching the issue, I found out I had to change the date transfer mode from PIO to DMA and have done that but the problem still is present. And then I find out that it has the data transfer mode has switched back to PIO. How do I correct / fix this problem of not being able to burn DVD’s?

SirQUK · Posted: Tue Jun 21, 2005 9:47 pm Post subject:

Hi CWILL1906 and welcome to our forums. It does sound like this dma issue is the cause of most of these problems. Is it just the harddrive that is switching back to pio mode or the writers too? This would suggest that the issue is with the IDE drivers if both are switching to pio. If you could supply some more information such as name of motherboard/operating system and hardrive I think we would have more to work with in trying to track down the cause of this. The fact that a format didnt resolve this issue could mean that maybe even the motherboard battery is dying and could not be retaing the data when you save it. So as much system specs as possible and we will track this down ( I hope )

CWILL1906 · Newbie Joined: 21 Jun 2005 Posts: 4

SirQUK, Thank you for your response. To answer your question and give more details here is the information of my system. 2003 Dell Dimension 4600 Series Intel Pentium 4 Processor at 2.66GHz 512 MB DDR SDRAM at 333MHz 80GB 7200 RPM Ultra ATA Hard Drive 16X DVD-Rom Drive The only items that I can tell are switching are in the IDE ATA/ATAPI Controller folder. As far as I can tell the primary and secondary IDE Controllers are all that are switching. Thanks again for your help.

SirQUK · Posted: Wed Jun 22, 2005 1:03 am Post subject:

Cheers for the system specs. One thing to springs to mind is that maybe you are running Intell accelerator drivers for your IDE controllers. When you view your controllers in device manager what do they say? ( any chance of a screenshot via the upload option when you reply please? ) Is this the only recording software you have installed on your system and are you running an anti virus with on demand system scanning whilst recording or maybe have the screensaver option enabled? - just trying to rule out possible causes at this point Smile

CWILL1906 · Newbie Joined: 21 Jun 2005 Posts: 4

Thanks SirQUK, I actually forgot to mention that I am running Windows XP Home Edition when listing my system specs, but here is the info that I could pull up. If I have done this right, I have attached the screenshot of the Device Manager. Before adding DVD CLoner 2.40 to my system, I already had Sonic, Roxio and Iomega HotBurn software installed. I have tried uninstalling them and having only DVD Cloner but after no change, I reinstalled them. As far as any anti virus software, I only have what was installed with the system and the screen saver is not set. What should my next steps be? Thanks again for your help.

SirQUK · Posted: Thu Jun 23, 2005 1:44 am Post subject:

CWILL1906 · Newbie Joined: 21 Jun 2005 Posts: 4

I un-installed the software before I reformatted the system but I was unaware of making a restore point. When I right clicked on the USB device, I did see a recording tab and made sure the xp recording engine was disabled.

chaosmaker · Moderator Joined: 29 Sep 2003 Posts: 450

Now get another picture with the usb devices expanded would be nice, usb 2 is not native to xp until sp1 and on that same token usb 2 is not added on windows update automatically, since you are using an external device. As far as everything else not staying set to DMA, I suggest you look in the bios and make sure the settings for the ide controllers are at auto, usually the IDE's won't switch back to PIO on their own until the channel picks up several errors with the device, when was the last time you defragged or ran diagnostics on the hard drive? and although you changed the recording functions under properties, in run type "services.msc" then look for IMAPI Burning cd-com, change start-up type to disabled. Which version of Roxio? and you can get rid of hotburn altogether if you don't use it.

SirQUK · Posted: Fri Jun 24, 2005 12:52 pm Post subject:

Just a thought DVDCloner 2.50 has been released with a few bug fixes mentioned in changelog on our main page. Maybe this can help?

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