Hi everyone! I have a different problem with each of my burners. I am using a Compaq Presario AMD Sempron 3400+ with WinXP SP2. My OEM burner is a HP DVD Writer 740b, it's about a year old but rarely used to burn. The problem I am having with it is that no matter what program I use to back up my DVD's, it will only burn between .3x and .6x. Never any faster. I have uninstalled it and the drivers but still no change. It reads just fine. It worked fine for the first week I bought the PC and then it just suddenly changed. The other burner is a Sony DVD RW DW-Q28A. It burns up to 16x. However, it seems that 95 percent of the DVDs I have burned lately start screwing up after an hour and a half into them, give or take. The screen will slowly start getting "blocks" in the picture and then after several minutes, it will either lock up altogether or just get progressively worse. Any ideas on this one? It is almost 2 years old I believe. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
Two different problems: HP = DMA issues, make sure that the drive is set to DMA and not PIO in Device Manager. Sony = cheap media. Slow your burn speed down to half the rated speed of the blank and use Verbatim or Taiyo Yuden discs for you backups. Stopping, stuttering, pausing and pixellation are typical of cheap media. Also make sure that you are using the most current version of firmware and do not use paper adhesive labels.
Hello and thanks for responding! I was looking through the device manager at my burner and wasn't able to find any references to DMA or PIO. Can you give me directions to where I am needing to be in XP?
Hi ;-) Here is a tool to do it all for you. http://svp.co.uk/helpdesk/index.php?_m=downloads&_a=viewdownload&downloaditemid=15
You won't see DMA settings where your drives are. You will find them under IDE ATA/ATAPI contollers. Most likely under the Secondary Ide Channel.
Thanks for the help everyone. I think the script worked. I did find the settings earlier but for some reason I couldn't change the one for device 0. ?Last used?, I think said PIO but it was already set for DMA. Now ?last used? says Ultra DMA or something so I am thinking it worked. I will try tomorrow and let y'all know! Thanks again!
You can always uninstall the drivers for your drive and reboot, XP will automatically find the correct drivers and reinstall them in DMA mode. Here is a DMA guideif you need it. Nice tool Zeb.
Zeb the tool worked great! That fixed the problem 100 percent! I burned a movie today and it actually came out fine. Thanks yet one more time for all the help guys!
