Hi all,

Before I take this overpriced piece of useless junk out and smash to very satisying small pieces. Wondered if anyone could help.

I got a,

AMD64 4400+ X2 Processor
2GB of Cosair 2.5 Ram
1 x 200GB WD SATA Drive
6600GT 256MB Dual SLI Gigabyte 3D1 G/Card
Windows XP Professional
2 x Pioneer 109 BK DVD Drives
Various Burning Software Main one is Nero 7
Gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI - Motherboard

I can burn a single DVD no problems at all. If I try to burn two DVDs or run Winrar while I do it or any other task. It then takes 20-30mins for a DVD to burn. Its a complete nightmare the buffer goes right down and im screwed for half an hour.

I am at my wits end figure this one out you can have a night with my wife and ill get the dog to fetch my slippers for you.

Somethings I have tried so far,

New operating system,
Different DVD Drives,
They are on UDMA 2,
New Cables,
Win XP PRO 64Bit
Win XP PRO fresh install and new drive
Buggered around with the BIOS settings
Different Burning software
Praying
Cursing
Hitting the computer
Saying sorry to it
Kissing it
No Overclocking
Overclocking
Temps are fine
Firmware updates

PLEASE HELP ME before I go nuts with it.

Cheers,

Bob

Just a thought, but you didn't mention it - I know you have an SATA HDD, but are your burners on seperate IDE channels?

May not be the answer, but I thought I'd take a guess! BTW, welcome - I enjoyed reading your post, made me smile (aside from your burning problem )

Yo-

Very good question-

Looks like you just may have to burn one disc at a time - remembering that burning is very cpu and RAM intensive-

Mike

running a dual core processor he should not be having any trouble multi tasking.

do you have the Nvidia mobo drivers installed? the Nvidia drivers have been known to cause problems with optical drives.

Tried allsorts with the IDE channels no difference. Same cable, different cable, seperate cables. Even I run Winrar then it slows the recording as well. Used to do it no problems a while ago no idea what happened .

Im running the Nvidia drivers like you said but I wouldnt be sure on how to remove and change the controller.

thanks for the replies so far its stopped me going nuts lol

Anymore ideas appreciated

If your trying to burn 2 images & run winrar, or even one image and winrar then your HDD will be thrashing around all over the place, this leads to low data rates as the head has to position itself every few mS's to service either WinRar or the image you are burning.

When you burn an image you are streaming data off your HDD (unless you are copying from DVD to DVD) and as such anything that tries to compete with the data flow will slow it down. I know I cant run any unzipper programs or any other programs that use alot of data from the HDD while I burn or I get buffer underruns.

I notice you only have one HDD so everything has to work from that one drive. If you always burn from images you may want to buy a 2nd HDD to put the images on so that the data flow from that drive can supply the burner and winrar etc can use the main drive to do its work with as well, also if you burn 2 images put one on each drive will reduce the head thrashing.

I have 2x200GB externals. It used to be a 2x200GB raid system. I did have the smae trouble. I am thinking that its probley the nvidia drivers as mentioned or the motherboard. Along the lines your saying about I have tried 1 image to 2 drives and that should keep the HDD in one place. Will have a little look and research about the PATA drivers.

Cheers

Did you check the burst rate on both drives by themselfs? Have you run any tests on the data flow of the hard drives read write seek. I can burn two at a time at 8X no problem. You got a physical (so to speak) bottleneck somewhere. Duel burning does not actually happen at the same time, there is a small amount of offset built in.

Hi,

Not sure how I would check the burst rate I have tried both drives on there own and they work perfect when not in dual mode. Thinking it may be a driver issue like the man said above about the PATA controller do you know if there is an alternative to this?

thanks all or the help so far.

Just so it doesnt turn into one of those bloody annoying posts where they never put the solution I reformatted again but used the original driver disks not the updated ones from the net. Worked okay.

At last a guy who returns to put the solution!!!


Thanks to all for the help.

Nice one