To me its very obvious that something is wrong with either the firmware or windows default driver compatibility. But from all the threads that i've read this marco guy seems to think thats its on our end and not BTC's. Whats the deal BTC is there going to be another firmware update to fix the problems with the DVDRW 1004 drive or not. I bought this darn thing a long time and ever since its been nothing but headaches. And it looks like i'm not the only one. Right now i have the ability to burn to regular CD's but when it comes to reading, writing, playing DVD's thats hell on earth. But the problem is i already have a CD burner. i wanted a media that i could put more data on at a resonable price. This is crap, major crap. if you are BTC spokemen you need to talk to the CSR reps and prey they don't send you an email with a stupid attachment like the rest of us. Maybe you guys should of stuck to 56k modems you use to sell a few years back!!

P.S. for those of you who are about to knock what i said read all the other post (not just one, all) on the BTC DVDRW 1004IM driver then you'll see what i'm talking about

"P.S. for those of you who are about to knock what i said read all the other post (not just one, all) on the BTC DVDRW 1004IM driver then you'll see what i'm talking about"

I never heard of satisfied Posters/Users who bought DVD/CD Drives or any other hardware in forums when they hadnt one Problem maybe one ore two but hey i think its stupid to say there are so many negative posts or help wanted that is usually normal i think.
To think all is the same especially
Hardware or System configurations is not really professionell ^^''

ps: sry for my bad english lol

With each update of the firmware I hope for joy, but am constantly disappointed. I'm now trying to find a single version of the firmware that I've used in the past that use to work with only one type of DVD media. At least then the drive will be more useful that a lead weight. Definately should've bought the Pioneer coz I would've been many $$$ ahead due to the number of coasters I've burnt with this drive just trying to find compatible media. And don't just say that there's a list on the site coz that's hardly appropriate when the box the drive comes with doesn't mention any compatibility issues, and what's more its darn hard to know the MID code of a DVD you see in the shop without purchasing one!

Some of the media listed on the compatability list don't even work!

This drive does have a lot more problems than most. I personally own a Pioneer 105, Nec 1300a, Cyberdrive D082DX, BTC1004IM, and I have a 106 at work. I have tested each of these drives in the same machine, same OS, software, only switch the drives between tests. In the end, I didn't even consider the BTC a writer because it simple is a piece of crap at that task. The only media that I found that would work consistantly on was Memorex -R ProdiscS03's. Shortly after that, Memeorex start shipping CMCMAG disks that did not work. None of my other drives have any problems with any of the disks I use (except the Cyberdrive is a + only so no - media). I have flashed it to the 1008IM firmware and can write the CMCMAG Memerex disks fine so this tells me it is the firmware that is the problem. To make it worse, BTC seems to have forgotten about the 1004IM. How many firmware updates have we seen for the 1008 in the last 6 weeks and only 1 for the 1004.

In the end, the Cyberdrive produces the best results of any of my drives. The BTC is used to read tough disks and thats it.

I have a BTC 1004 and I have burned over 50 DVDs, (about 20 DVD-R & 30 DVD+R) and I have rewritten 10 DVD+RWs about 6 or 7 times each, all brands I bought in local stores, Verbatim, Intenso, Ritek, Packard Bell. I have NOT HAD ONE FAILED BURN. This drive works like a little champ. It actually works better than my old Pioneer 105, i.e. the 105 made more coasters (than zero) and it's a lot quieter.

If the technical ability of some of the anti-BTC folks is on a level with their spelling ability, I am not surprised they are getting problems. 3 problems I have read about with this drive turned out to be:-

1. The guy had it sharing an IDE channel with a hard disk.
2. The guy had PIO mode selected.
3. the guy was using Nvidia chipset drivers.

In each of these cases, once things were put right, the guys said, "this drive works like a champ"...

These drives are examples of how cheap DVD writers are getting, I think maybe a lot of dumb teenagers are putting DVD writers in their PC, they buy a bulkpack of no-name blanks, and the first time they get a coaster, they simply stick another blank in and try again. After 10, 20 or 30, it's "Hey! this drive is a P.O.S."

contrex,

I just read your post. I have an Intel PIII-500, Intel SE440BX-2 motherboard [I think the Intel IDE drivers are loaded], 384MB SDRAM, Windows 98SE and the following IDE configuration.

Pri Mstr: Maxtor 13.6GB HDD
Pri Slav: MicroAdvantage/BTC 1004IM
Sec Mstr: Maxtor 80GB HDD
Sec Slav: Western Digital 80GB HDD

Both IDE ribbon cables are of the new 80-wire configuration.

I have used the following discs: Starlogic/Princo 1-2x DVD-R, Khypermedia/TDK DVD-R, Ridata 1-4x DVD-R and Ridata 1-2.4x DVD+RW with a mixed bag of success and failure.

Backups of my DVD movies
-- used DVD Decrypter & DVD Shrink
-- copies worked fine with the Starlogic & Khypermedia

Backups of my PS2 games
-- used Nero 6.0.3.2 with Starlogic & Khypermedia, all fail
-- used DVD Decrypter 3.1.6.0 up to 3.2.1.0 using:
-- (2) Ridata DVD-R, one will not load, other A/V glitchy
-- (3) Khypermedia DVD-R, none will load
-- (~30) Starlogic DVD-R, half work fine, other half will not load or A/V is glitchy [usually discs with cartoon video is problematic].

Any failed PS2 backup disc is still good enough to extract onto a friend's PC with an 8x Optodisc DVDRW and burn a perfect copy.

So, centrex, the short of this post is ... if I remove a HDD and put the BTC 1004IM as the Secondary Master without a Secondary Slave present, do you think my problems will go away??? Thanks in advance for answering my question!

ski

Only problem I've had with mine is some media not being compatible with one of my standalones. I have burned over 100 dvds and had 0 coasters that were the drives fault. A few in the begining but i am a fast learner (hehe) that were my own fault.

skiman my guess for your problem is:

1. you need a fasterr processor
2. more ram and faster too 512 mb minimum I like at least 1gig

so you'll be needing a new motherboard, processor, and lots of ram.

I know that it is possible to burn dvd's with such a slow setup but you would be amazed with the quality of dvds burned with a much better system

Come to think of it maybe is it not only the drive who produces problems i think the system self is not optimal configured .
I dotn know why so many people have problems with the 1004im but if it really is the firmware BTC should try to help the costumers with a new firmware the support of the firmware for the 1004im is halfdead after the release of newer modells but is this ok ? O.o

hy

i feel like contrex, i´m very happy with my drive, it works good all the time, iburned also about 60 dvd´s and about 20 cdr in the last three month and all medias are working well, and there is no difference between movie, homevideo, ps2 game, data or music cdr.

i think that people who feel that the drive is good, are not posting as much as people who have problems.

@skiman,

i would give it a try, in my sys the 1004 is sek master and all ps2 backup´s are working well, i´m using ritek g04 media and fw 49, ok there are some pb´s with writespeed 2x when 4x set, but the medias are working well and the speed makes no pb for me. i hope this little pb will be solved in fw50.

cu

I think there is a very good chance. Ever since I first started using ide optical drives back in the 90s, it has always been well known that it is a seriously BAD IDEA to have an optical drive (CD=ROM, CD-RW, DVD-ROM, DVD-RW) sharing an ide channel with a hard drive.

With a CD-ROM or DVD-ROM, the whole ide channel will drop down to the speed of the slowest device, so in that situation the "bad thing" that happens is slow hard drive access.

With a writer, you get all of that plus the system may not be able to deliver data to the writer fast enough burn successfully.

That 13.6 GB Maxtor sounds a bit slow and old... Can't you ditch it? It is your boot disk? Is it your Windows system disk? Where your burning software caches the data for burning? To the writer on the same ide channel? Uh-Oh! (You are getting the picture?) Add in a bit of fragmentation and some swap file activity and a couple of other apps running and that memory size, and you might just as well open a DOS box and type "coaster please" at the prompt. Windows 98?????? Do you have a special reason for using this antique? Like you disapprove of w***z?

You may have to make one of the 80GB disks take its place somehow. Partition Magic and Symantec Ghost are good tools to have. Or a new install of Windows (This can magically improve things!!)

So putting it on the secondary channel as master would give it a good start.

Defrag your hard drives regularly. This is a big cause of failed burns.

You probably need the 80 wire ide cable for your hard drives if they are UDMA 66 or above, but the BTC 1004 is a UDMA33 device and a 40 wire cable is fine. Some people actually prefer 40 wire cables for dvd writers.

You are a bit light on CPU speed and memory but if you configure your system as above, to give the DVD writer a fighting chance, you might well have some success.

PS A lot of people say very bad things about Princo media.

Anyway, good luck, and if you are a teenager, (or if you are not), sorry about my snooty remarks about dumb teenagers. i was one myself, I now recall.

Let us know how you get on.

for some reason you guys seem to keep shifting the blame to other hardware configurations and not the drive itself. LOOK AT THE OTHER POST. Just because yours works and you have no problems doesn't mean everyone is is as lucky as you. by the way my system specs are as follows

OS: windows XP
CPU: 2500+
RAM: 768 PC2700

oh and my DVD burner is on an ide channel all by itself.

again look at the other post and most people have simular problems

Just because yours does not work and you have many problems doesn't mean everyone is is as unlucky as you.

Many cases have been proven to be misconfiguration. Just because your drive is a P.O.S. does not mean we cannot give advice to others about theirs.

Also, threads where people rant on about how BTC drives are crap, are boring. Whereas trying to solve a problem is interesting.

Hehe thats the point my drive for me is working well if i had my old mainboard or my second PC with that curious Graficcards issue i would possibly have problems with the drive.

Forget the idea to stuff any thingie in your PCs and its perfect configured thats just a dream right now.
Possible Malfunctions are misconfigured systems like said above or some little stupid thing nobody thought.
For Example i have on my second PC a strange issue if i change the Grafikscard from Ati Rag 2C too any better card the USB BUS is malfunctioning like hell.
Or my old CD/RW Drive i had before the 1004im, its an LG 8481B, no problems in my first PC in my second PC it had problems to the beginning but now its fine i reinstalled Windows and configured the whole machine.
Dont blame so often just the Hardware no HArdware can function optimal terms when the software isnt as good as the Hardware.

the firmware killed my BTC1004. I was very happy with it, apart from slight compatibility issues, so I thought "Hey! Firmware updates are meant to fix that sort of thing! let's get their latest Firmware update!", well now I am left with a CD-R drive (it can't even write CD-RWs anymore) with no DVD capabilities at all.
I really didn't expect that the firmware from their official website would so totally mess up my drive, but thats what happened.

as for the "3 main reasons why people have problems with the drive", I checked for those and none of those are the case in my system and I think that almost 20 years of handling computers on my own have thought me enough to work out most of the easy-to-solve problems, so I guess it isn't such a small problem I have here.

anyway, like I said, it is a very decent drive, so I have no intention of bashing BTCs products ... the techsupport is a totally different topic though. wrote an email to the address given on the BTC site and got an autoreply with a form to fill out, which I did fill out and send back. funny thing is that the only reply I ever got was the exact same auto-reply with the form to fill out ... I would've hoped to at least get a message telling me to bring the drive back to the store, as it is faulty, or something like this.
so thats the reason I'm not too fond of BTC anymore. bought a NEC now and hopefully that will give me less headaches.

apart from all that, congrats to everyone with a working BTC1004, because there are many people who do have problems with this drive and many have just brought it back.

again, this does not mean that it is a bad drive, it isn't, but the lack of tech support (or at least the "not so easy to reach" tech support) make up for the good price of this drive.

I'm not disappointed by the drive not working, thats something I can live with with such a cheap drive, I'm disappointed that, even though I did exactly what I was supposed to do to update the firmware, it still killed the drive and no other firmware version was able to revive it.

like I said (about 500 times alone in this post ) it's a good drive and if you are willing to take the (seemingly higher than with other drives) risk of a faulty drive, you should really go for it as you probably will get a decent drive at a very decent price (see? I am actually aware that most drives will be fine ).

on a side note: it is of course true that people with problems are more likely to post on a forum like this, but as anyone can easily see from most of the problem-threads here, most of these problems could've solved with only a little work or more information or by a easily accesible and good working tech support (this is, as you may or may not have noticed by now, my main gripe with BTC ).


... but hey! I now have a 40x CD-R drive, which is still 10 times faster than my old Sony (oh geez, how could I ever forget about the issues I had with that bugger )

I'll keep playing around with my BTC 1004, maybe it will some day magically be restored into a fully working DVD-RW drive ...

if you are too lazy to read all my ramblings:
the BTC 1004 is a decent drive for a decent price, but it seems to be giving many people problems, which is OK and, tbh, also to be expected, as you always try your luck with cheap hardware. although I still like what the drive did for me when it was still working, I am disappointed by BTCs tech support, which seems to be rather, excuse my french, crap.
Marco has posted a lot of helpful stuff here and has helped out quite a lot of people, so I will not say anything against him

thanks for reading, now back to the topic

You can add me to the list of those witch have now a CD-burner instead of a DVD-burner. This drive have burnt one DVD for me and 20 mn later it was not even able to recognize a simple DVD. Does someone has found a way to solve this problem yet ?
When the problem occured I was using firmware 40. I have updated it now to v50 without any change...

I do know that firmware 039 had a bug in the burn strategy for DVDs where a laser head could actually overheat and become destroyed (permanently).

I do not know whether this was fixed in 040...

Unfortunately V0040 was messed up too...

http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread....are+%2A1004%2A

Well too bad that we try to find an answer to our problems AFTER they occured... I don't understand how BTC can sell something without testing it at first...
The drive that is now a CD-burner was sold with a desktop unit from Olidata so which one should I call, Olidata or BTC ?

Why can't you guys RMA your drives if they are so bad? I know if i bought something and it didn'twork to my satisfaction out of the box then if a firmware upgrade didn't work or made it worse I'd be RMAing the mofo. It is posible that a lot of these drives are crap, and if there is then I'd say BTC has some serious Quality Control Issues.

My MicroAdvantage came with firmware 039 and I burned one disc with it. It burned OK, but it wouldn't read on any of the DVD players I tried it with, or on a Toshiba 1512 DVD-ROM or a Lite-On DVD-ROM. It would only work in the drive that burned it.

So I flashed it to 049 firmware and reburned the same image to a new disc. It worked on my Lite-On and stand alone DVD players. I had to upgrade the firmware on the Toshiba 1512 (to read + media) to get it to read it, but now it works with it also.

The funny thing is after I flashed the MicroAdvantage with 049 it wouldn't read that first DVD I burned either, so something was definetly wrong with the 039 firmware. All is well now and I don't see any need to upgrade to the 050 firmware ... yet.