before i used to recode and burn in about 40 minutes with 4x dvd's. now recode is taking forever to 'compile dvd volume' total burn time is now 1 hour with 8x! please help!

i have win xp
nero ultra 6 ver. 6.6.14
nero digital ver. 3.1.0.25

The first thing is to use Nero Infotool and see if DMA is "on" for your burner.
Next would be to defrag your hard drive.

i've checked dma and it is enabled, and doesn't reset to PIO when the computer restarts. I've re-formated my harddrive. the total time only improved like 20 minutes. so it went from 1hr 30 min to 1hr 20min at 8x.

thx for everyone's concern, but i think i figured out my problem. the secondary hard-drive i've been saving everything on is unusable. i tried ripping to the main hard-drive and everything is running smoothly. but i do have one question. if i have already deleted the old partition and created a new one, and it is still unusable, does that mean i can no longer use it?

thx for everyone's concern, but i think i've figured out my problem. the secondary harddrive i've been working from is corrupt. i'm working from the primary one now. but i do have a question. i deleted the old partition on the secondary and re-formatted it, if it still isn't working does that mean i can no longer use it? thx again.

What tells you that it's corrupt? Does Windows recognize the hard drive?
Just remember that the more it has to compress (like copying the whole disk instead of just the main movie) the longer it takes, and "two pass" quality takes longer too.
I use DVD Shrink. I used it to do King Kong a few days ago. I just did the main movie which is over 7 gb. The best compression ratio I could get was 56%. With doing a deep analysis and using AEC it took 3 hrs to do, but the quality was execelent. Good copies take time if they are heavily compressed.

well i've also dl some anime and music to my secondary harddrive, which windows xp still recognizes, but the playback is choppy for some reason. so i cut and paste the files to the primary harddrive, and playback is fine.

i use dvd decrypter and nero. when i use the primary hard drive it takes only about 13 minutes to rip a dvd with my pioneer 110d, read speed was up to 11x (to rip to the secondary hard drive it takes 1hr and read speed is only about 1.1x tops with the same hardware). it takes 15 minutes to recode and burn from the primary at 8x, and it was taking 1hr and 20min to recode and burn from the secondary with the same config.

so am i safe to say that something is wrong with the secondary harddrive? that it's unusable?

No, but you might want to get a diskutility going and do a deep scan on the entire drive; to include disk surface. This will take a while.

Also, is it addressed as 0:2 *slave to main* or 1:0 *secondary running on another channel*

I haven't experienced this problem, then again I only have 1 hard drive/1 burner.

It does take forever to render avi movies to DVD (using NeroVision) or ReCode to the nero digital format. Is this normal?