In early December I ordered an NEC 3500A along with 5 DVD-R disks. I finally got around to installing it in early March after my new 200GB storage drive came in. I did the firmware update on the NEC drive then backed up two DVD-5 movies to try it out which worked fine. My third attempt at backing up was a DVD-9 which didn't work out because I probably did it wrong. That left me with two disks so I tried the DVD-9 backup again which worked fine the second time. On my last disk I attempted to backup another DVD-9 but when doing so DVD Shrink didn't give me the option to burn to disk after the movie had been copied to my HD, it didn't list my NEC as an option. The drive also made a strange clicking sound while doing this so I looked in the Device Manager under DVD/CD drives and my NEC wasn't listed there. I rebooted then checked the Device Manager and the drive was listed there. I thought it must have been a fluke or something. When attempting the DVD-9 backup again on my last disk it did give me the option to burn to disk so I did so. At the very last part of burning the disk the NEC drive started making that clicking sound again but the backup seemed to complete successfully. When replaying the movie in the last few minutes it freezes, skips part of the movie, plays some more then freezes up and stops playing. I'm all out of DVD disks now until my order of TY DVD-R's come in from the Supermediastore so I wont be able to try again until Tuesday or so. Here's my setup, don't laugh, it's old but it was a kick butt machine when I built it in 2000. Asus K7V-T Slot A mobo with Award BIOS 1007 AMD Athlon Slot A 1000Mhz CPU 1536 MB Crucial RAM Primary Master - Maxtor 80GB 8Mb 7200RPM Primary Slave - Rosewill CD/DVD ROM Combo Drive for DVD Reading/Playing Secondary Master - NEC 3500A Secondary Slave - Maxtor Storage drive In the system BIOS at bootup for the NEC 3500A Type: Auto PIO Mode: 4 - Options are 0,1,2,3,4 Ultra DMA Mode: 2 - If set to 4 it goes back to 2 on it's own Should the NEC drive be set to Master and the storage HD set to slave or visa versa, or does that matter? I guess there's not much more I can do until I get more disks in to check it with. NymRod
First, get your storage drives on the same IDE buss. (Primary IDE) Then put your burner on the secondary IDE in the Master position with your ROM on the same buss in the Slave position. Second, Shrink can't burn anything. It can enable other programs to burn automatically (Nero, Decrypter) at the proper point in the process. Set your drives to DMA once you get them both on the secondary IDE Buss. Having 80 conductor IDE cables will help to get the DMA level up.
NymRod, You should have the HD as Primary master and the Maxtor storage drive as the slave on the primary. Then the DVD burner should be the Master on the Sec. IDE and the CD rom should slave on the Sec Ide. I take it the Maxtor storage drive is a HD? The sound you heard is not good in my opinion and you might have to send the drive back. Have you called where you bought it at asked them . When you get the disks in try it again and if you hear the noise again I would send the drive back as it should be under warranty
I thought I read somewhere that the read drive and write drive need to be on different IDE channels so the info doesn't have to go back and forth down the same cable. I think I'll just put together another machine just for this DVD backup stuff. I have more of the same stuff in the way of PC parts but nothing faster. A 1Ghz machine aint all that much to start with, I can't do anything while it's doing DVD stuff. I think that's how the first DVD-9 went bad, checking my email while it was going on. It's probably been too long since I bought the drive to send it back where I got it, I bought it from Newegg on Nov. 28th, arrived in early Dec. All I used to do the backup was DVD Shrink but I do have DVD Decrypter and Nero 5.5 installed on this machine. Here's what I selected from the drop-down list when I burned it. So I guess it used one of the other programs to burn with? I don't know how all this stuff works, I just follow the guides to get it done. NymRod
As far as the burning goes, you're burning with nero and just selecting which drive you want nero to burn with... Also, while backing up dvd's you should just leave your puter alone... trying to run other programs (internet, email, etc.) can cause you to have coasters... Carl
The correct configuration is as Car.mike and I described. I actually have my optical drives swapped around on my secondary IDE, but they are on one buss. My second HDD is by itself of the primary IDE buss. Main HDD is a pair of sata drives. Your pix shows Nero selected to burn with.
I didn't think it could use Nero to burn with being my version is 5.5 that doesn't include DVD burning but I guess it can. BTW, I also have four 40GB 7200 RPM Maxtor drives just alike, I thought about doing a RAID 5 configuration to speed things up some but I don't have a RAID controller card, just a Promise FastTrak 133 that wont do RAID 5. I could do a RAID 1 with four of the drives. Would that make it any faster than a single 80GB 7200 RPM 8MB drive? Does the RAID array use the cache the same as the storage space? If I used four drives with 2MB cache size each would it then be like 8MB cache or would it be 4MB for RAID 1 or 2MB cache? I boot from the 80GB 8MB drive now with a 50GB partition for storage space. I use the 200GB Maxtor 7200 RPM 8MB HD for storage. NymRod