Hello all, a friend recently asked me to take a look at his computer, as he's had some issues copying his homemade (unprotected) DVDs recently. The computer is approximately 1.5 yrs old, running Windows Vista, and burning with Nero 7.5.9.0. (using burning rom's copy function specifically). He's never had problems before, using Sony DVD-Rs at 16x, this problem just started occurring about a week ago. The burn fails at the very start, saying "could not perform starttrack". The disc is then useless as it's no longer recognized as blank. I'll tell you what we've tried, and then you can look at the log file, hopefully someone will see something that will give us a clue! We've confirmed that his DVD drive has the latest firmware. We've uninstalled Nero using the clean tool, and re-installed. We've tried burning with a different brand of disc (Maxell). We've tried burning at lower speed (4x). We've tried changing the location of the temp image. All in all, no luck, the burn still fails every time, and I'm out of options short of replacing his DVD drive. Any help/advice you may have would be greatly appreciated!
If it's an IDE drive and if DMA is off, see the guide about turning it on. http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/260038
Sorry for the delay in replying, I haven't had access to my friend's machine until today. It's not an IDE drive, it's SATA, I looked under device manager anyway to see if there was any option for DMA, but couldn't find anything. While I was in there I tried uninstalling the drive and re-adding it, but that didn't seem to help anything either. Is there something else I should be looking for, or should I recommend that he replace the drive?
Before doing that, try burning with ImgBurn. It will also provide a log (Top menu, Help > ImgBurn Logs..). Then I would post the log at the ImgBurn Support Forum. http://forum.imgburn.com/
Thanks, I should have tried that when I was there today (it was on my "to-try" list), but I thought I'd research any sata-specific issues first. I'll probably be back there tomorrow or Friday at the latest, so I'll follow your recommendation and post the imgburn log at that other forum. Thanks again for your help!
Well, as an update, I used Nero to create an NRG image, and tried burning it with Imgburn, and it worked flawlessly at max speed. Then I tried burning the same image with Nero, and it failed with the same error. I'm completely confused now, I really thought it might be the drive failing, but obviously it works fine with Imgburn. It doesn't make sense that it's a Nero settings problem, as I had cleaned all of that out with CleanTool and reinstalled. Nero was able to copy these discs prior to a couple of weeks ago. Not sure where to go from here... my friend is not very computer literate, so I'd prefer to keep him working within one program, but if I have to train him to use Imgburn to create and burn images, then I'll do what has to be done. But it seems like there still might be a solution to this that I haven't thought of...
If you have an RW disk, use ImgBurn to 'Create image file from disc' then 'Write image file to disc' a number of time to see if it's ok. From the log: Does this appear on all the failed burns? If you Google that phrase, it's all over the place. I haven't seen anything that fixes it - it's not a Nero specific problem;it seems to be a burner/software issue in Vista.
