Slimtype DVDRW SOSW-833S Media Problems

No..unfortunately, when I first started up the notebook, everything auto-installed with no options as to formatting etc. I was stuck with FAT32. Also I tried using convert.exe but an error came up saying the drive could not be converted to NTFS. I forget the exact script but I seem to remember that it was do to the installation/software configuration (?) Anyway this has been most frustrating.

 

Hi, guys.

My mistake. I tried running convert.exe again and it said that the drive needed to be unmounted before conversion. By restarting Windows, the c: drive converted to NTFS. Thanx gentlemen for your assistance at least that's one less pain in the *ss...now if I can figure out this dvd drive issue!

 

After converting yesterday to NTFS I backed up two movies last night. One older and one newer. I also used +r and -r dvd's. I had no trouble what so ever. The dvd's played on both the laptop and my normal dvd player. I will post if I encounter any problems.

 

Interesting. I converted to NTFS and I can burn dvd+r disks fine but not the dvd-r's. Still thats better than most on this forum.

Can the users who have very slow speeds confirm if there hard disks are in fat32 or ntfs?

 

My extreme slow speeds were on my acer aspire notebook formatted to FAT32. A 3 gig file took in excess of 2 1/2 hours. As mentioned above I just converted to NTFS late last night and I will attempt another burn tonight after work. Let you know if there is any improvement. Here's hoping!

 

Well, I tried a burn at 8x,4x and 2.4x with the same result, it would start the burn perfectly, then at exactly 12% (at all speeds) the buffer level would start fluctuating between 20 and 80%. The speed would drop off drastically even though Nero continued counting down the remaing time as if it were running at "normal" speed. This fluctuating buffer level for the burner is indicative of a data stream interruption causing a buffer underrun situation. The HDD was converted from fat32 to ntfs, all extraneous processes have been turned off and still it refuses to burn at a constant speed. I then hooked up my trusty external USB LG super multi-drive and the disk burned lightning speed with 100% buffers. Therefore I contend that the problem remains an internal IDE bus, data tunneling problem.

 

hi I have been also experiencing problems with some media type - usually of the low quality or unknown manufacturers. But editing the firmware and then flashing it IS REALLY the solution !!! i tried PLASMON 1A disc and on VRS03 it didnt work at all showing max speed of x1 but not working at all .... at VS 04 it allowed x2 , then I edited the firmware with OMNIPATCHER and created entry with the name of PLASMON1A and speed of x8. After flashing the new bios - everything worked fine even without reboot - i was quite desperate i just bought 100 plasmon dvd-r didnt really want to throw them away ))

 

Hey jonbest,

My 60GB drive in my Acer Aspire 3613WLMi is partioned in two and both partitions are NTFS.

I'm currently burning at 2x only cuz anything speed above just slows down wayyyyy to much. I haven't been able to find anything out lately as I've been busy as hell and was hoping that someone somewhere found a solution and posted here.

Anyway, I plan on calling those oh so unqualified tech support peeps at Acer again next week to see what they can do for me. As usual if I have any info I'll be sure to post it.

Cheers!

 

I got a aspire 1642 yesterday as an insurance replacement. i am really annoyed that I am having problems with it already. I uninstalled NTI as it locked up the machine and installed nero 7. In the end I dragged the ts file to desktop and burned back with Imgtool Burn and the 16 spd burned at 1x, the 8 spd burned at 2x and I got some cheap 4 spd from SVP which did burn at about 3-4 spd. I am annoyed that the hard drives are in fat 32 and what is with the 2 partitions anyway? For £700 this is a piece of C..p! My f/ware version is 02. I am worried about flashing in case they say it invalidates my warranty. I will be keeping an eye on this forum. I don't even know if I can send it back as it was form the insurance. O ne of my keyboard keys started to fall off within 4 hours of use! This is just a plastic piece of rubbish and not worth what they say it is worth.

 

Hello Sam, yes you should be able to return your Acer under warranty even if you upgrade your firmware. I did have an Acer Aspire 1642 with exactly the same problems (I posted earlier in the forum) and took it back to comet on the 28th day, I replaced it with a Toshiba Satelite M70-267 a laptop with 2 ide channels and a decent dvd cd writer combo. I tried flashing my firmware to both version 3 and 4 but could never get it to work properly. Acer told me it was a discontinued laptop with and old dvd drive fitted so I complained and told Acer I wasn't happy and because I only had the laptop 28 days I wanted a full refund, they told me to return it to Comet (where i bought it from) for either a full refund or a replacement. I took the replacement and my Toshiba has been fine, 2 ide channels a Pioneer dvd drive that writes dvd's at 8x fine, also writes dvd rams too which is a bonus. All in all a much better Laptop. Return your Acer my friend.

Bob

 

But who would I return it to? My insurance company was only authorised to offer me this laptop as a replacement for mine which was an emachines. I am using my trusty NEC in an external caddy. It burns nicely at 16x. My friend has an aspire with the sempron. His dvd burner is burning fine and it is the same one. he is going to load win xp pro on it for me this weekend. He says that has helped him a lot. The soft loaded xp in the acer recovery make sthe pc less efficient. Will keep you all posted.

 

hi i had the same probs when i first got my acer aspire 3003wlmi and i couldnt work out wot was wrong so i got rid of the softload winxp home and tried xp pro sp2 and it worked fine after that i can burn a full dvd in 13 minutes and it picks up on datawrite 8 speed dvd-r and burns then at that i am still on vrs2 firmware aswell i have come to believe that it is the winxp softload also since i got rid of the softload and hardloaded it i can play games better like unreal tournament 2004 etc hope this helps

 

TEW999 If am not mistaken you also reformatted my hard drive the other day as well. Since the reformat, it has worked a lot better. It burns +RWs faster and will pick up my 8x discs @ 8x, though it can still take around 20 mins to burn a disk. BUT.... this is a lot better than it was before. So thanks for the reformat The softload is terrible and eats the ram a lot. Now it is hard loaded it runs faster, never locks up and will even play tso better. The drive is still terrible and I think the fact that AMD chips run burning programmes a lot better than intel chips. The 1640 series is centrino and your 3000 series is sempron. COuld this also be a factor?

BTW welcome to Afterdawn Tom hugs

 

hi guys i have the same drive in my laptop and was having trouble with the media i was using for a couple of years on my desktop with no problem so i went to pc world last night and bought some new discs i got sont 8x +r which showed at 8x in nero and i burned a full dvd movie and it took 13m 12s i also got verbatim 8x-r which took 14m10s for the same movie now it says it burned successfully at 8x and the movie played no problems on my dvd player as well but that timing is very close to 4x which took 16m 5s i also got verbatim cd-r 52x and they burned perfectly at 24x i'm very happy with the cds but speed for the dvds is still not right. it is illegal to advertise something that won't do what is says so if this drive does work at the full speeds that they say then acer should inform us of which media that works at the stated speeds

 

hi guys i have the same drive in my laptop and was having trouble with the media i was using for a couple of years on my desktop with no problem so i went to pc world last night and bought some new discs i got sony 8x +r which showed at 8x in nero and i burned a full dvd movie and it took 13m 12s i also got verbatim 8x-r which took 14m10s for the same movie now it says it burned successfully at 8x and the movie played no problems on my dvd player as well but that timing is very close to 4x which took 16m 5s i also got verbatim cd-r 52x and they burned perfectly at 24x i'm very happy with the cds but speed for the dvds is still not right. it is illegal to advertise something that won't do what is says so if this drive does work at the full speeds that they say then acer should inform us of which media that works at the stated speeds

 

Have just contacte Acer Support to ask about the illegal advertising issue. They told me to do a system restart using the bios and dvd backup as the files "Must be corrupted". When I read a few Afterdawn posts to him, he was not amused. I said that the drive is faulty and isn't it illegal to advertise something that does not do what it says. He said if a system restart did not work then I would need to bring it in for them to check.. Yeah right and lose my laptop for god kows how long? WHen the laptop is out of warranty, I will consider replacing the drive with one I can get from SVP for £55. This is an NEC burner and ake care.they are always reliable. Seems to me the only thing to do..... T

 

I've been playing with ACER Aspire 3610 since november last year. I have the same problem with burning the dvd and also the ordynary cd discs. Moreover when I copy/burn anything from/into dvd/cd the system slows dow n horribly too. It takes about 11 min to copy 700 MB from cd!!! I realy do't know what to do with this piece of sh... When I'm playing a dvd movie on it, it also is slowed and the sound is going blocky... I thought at first it might be some kind of virus and now, when I had read all the posts in this topic, I know the fault is in the hardwear. If you had any problems as mine (the system slowdown) please, post it. Maybe you know how to repair it.

 

If you are still using the original software then you will really need to get a copy of windows xp (pro is better than home and you can get a cheap oem copy on ebay) and reformat your pc. You need to backup as much data as possible using the NTI backup software first.

Once the pc is reformatted install the drovers from your restore cds/dvd that I presume you made when you first activated the pc. Then you load all the correct drivers onto the pc. Then install any programmes you choose. I recommend Nero instead of NTI. It took over an hour to burn a dvd yesterday even though it said 8 speed! Using nero it takes about 30 mins on an 8 speed disk.

I also use imgtoolburn to burn ts folders, erase rewriteable discs etc. It is freeware. Just put Imgtoolburn into a search engine and go to coujo's portal.

I find that having the PC hard loaded it is a lot better. It is not the best laptop I've seen, but as I got it as a insurance replacement I can't complain too much! I find that I can now run The SIms 2. I also use freeram XP by Yourware. This freeware programme frees up ram and helps to keep your pc running smoothly. I find that by having the ram optimised things run smoother, but only on a hard loaded system. Hope this helps

 

I had an Acer laptop - it was stolen - it did most things fine - the main problem with it was that I could not burn DVD's -
it was always hit and miss as to whether they'd have CRC errors or not - even writing at the slowest speed in safe mode.

I was told that probably this was due to lack of memory - it had 256mb....

The (insurance) replacement was a higher spec machine with XP Pro instead of XP Home and 512mb instead of 256mb.

However the new laptop had a CD-rw/DVD-r combo instead of a DVD-rw that the original had - I had this upgraded (at the
insurers expense) to a DVD-rw with a proper Acer drive (guess what a Slimtype DVDRW SOSW-833S) fitted by a local (but non approved) computer shop.

After about a month of use my machine developed a problem that meant that it could not play any media from any source -
audio (mp3/audio CD/wav etc) or video (mpg, avi, DVD) from any source (CD/DVD, hard disk, Lacie external hard disk) without
jumping and stuttering.

I tried everything I could think of and eventually 'bit the bullet' and decided to rebuild it - to find that the recovery CD
supplied would not work with the new drive.

So I took it to the aforementioned computer shop who rebuilt it.

All was hunky dory for about a month - but now I'm back in 'jumpy/stuttery media mode' again without any real reason
(no new programs/no viruses/spyware/defragged etc) - AND - I've discovered that it seems incapable of writing either a CD or
DVD reliably without CRC errors - even in safe mode at the lowest write speeds.

I really feel like throwing the bloody thing out.

My questions are:

1. Should my machine be capable of writing clean CD/DVDs (why do laptop makers sell machines with DVD-rws if you can
never actually write one with it!) - out of a dozen CD/DVDs written only 2 DVDs are clean.

2. Can I copy my old 'recovery' disc to my hard disc and write it with a new bootstrap that will work with my DVD-rw - so at
least I can rebuild the machine myself (I've tried this - but see point 1).

3. What might be causing my machine to be unable to play media - it seems to me that it must be a 'system' rather than a
'sound/graphics card' or drive problem as it's so universal.

I'm really pretty fed up with it all.

Any help you can give would be much appreciated - and feel free to ask any questions that may be of use.

Thanks in advance.

Tony

 

I've had the same problem with my acer laptop (As I had written earlier in this topic). I made the recovery (with my Acer recovery DVD) and than it was OK but there was still a problem with reading/writing cd's/dvd's. At firs, when I had bought that comp. it was everything OK and beautiful. But than, one day it started going "jumpy/stuttery" as you had written (Tony). And I also think it has something to do with the system. A friend of mine, who has got a Sony Vaio, said there was a hidden particion on his disc containing some recovery system data, and he just removed it. I don't know if there is sth like that on our comp.'s but I will try to find out if there is and try to make sth with it. Maybe it would help.