I have a Pioneer DVR-108 w/ latest firmware installed. I am having some problems with it. When I burn a dvd, Sometimes during the burn it will stop and say something like it couldnt perform due to a i/o error and 20 failed retries. And also says: "The specified network resource or device is no longer available" And the drive appears to have dissappeared and no writers are found and its not listed in device manager. I do notice that before it goes offline (I guess thats the term), That a red question mark appears beside the drives icon. This happens on non-copy protected dvds. If I reboot, Its all ok, But doesnt last all that long. System: P4 3GHZ 1 Gig ram Seagate 120gig and WD 200gig HDs Win XP SP2 DVDs Used: Ritek g05s. I havent installed any software lately or changed any settings.
The first thing I'd try would be some different media. The best you can get over the counter without doing a lot of research is Verbatim DataLife Plus or Sony. +R is a personal preference. The Taiwan Sony is the Sony product, usually with the Japanese product being Mitsubishi, both excellent. The DataLife Plus are manufactured by topline manufacturers, so no problem there. It's not a waste, you'll be able to use them if it isn't the problem. Even Ritek can have the occasional bad run. Next you get into the mechanics of the PC. There you can have anything from a faulty cable to a software problem with the OS interface. My suggestion there would be to check the drive with one of the drive utilities. You can use a free download of SiSoft Sandra or a utility from the Nero suite if you have it. Nero has a download trial as well. DVDInfoPro is a good app for checking recordable media.
Thanx for the reply. I use Nero all the time, But seldom use it for dvd burning. I dont think I quite understand about the media thing though, How could media make a drive vanish from the device manager though? I would suspect that to be more hardware related? After this happens, Dvd-Decrypter wont eject the disc, Says to hit F5 to refresh, But the drive just will not open and I have to reboot in order to eject the dvd. I just made a run of 4 burns and all worked fine. It seems to be Hit and Miss, Sometimes it hits and burns fine (80% of the time) and the rest is a miss (20%). I know 20% isnt much, But that does begin to accumulate coasters after awhile.
Never believe media won't cause some weird problems. With a drive trying to read bad media or trying to write to faulty media, you run into redundancy errors while using up a lot of memory, even with 1GB. From what you say though, I doubt it being media. The reboot and then recording functioning excludes that scenario. From the additional info, I'm wondering about the interface and memory. First of all, did you use the utilities to check the drive? Maybe not the problem, but it might give some insight. Use the task manager while the program is running and see if there is anything causing the system memory to drop too low. Sounds like you may be tying up your resources and when you reboot, the problem is resolved for a while. Do you do your routine maintenance on a regular interval; disk cleanup, anti-virus, defrag and the like? Would you by any chance have a protected recycle bin? What app are you using for recording and does your version of Nero include InCD?
