Experienced Considerable slowness Extracting with Fab and writing w/ Decryp

[giohonam]

I 've had my machine for 4 months now and i've always been able to use DVDFab decrypter averaging 9 or 10 minutes to extract 7 or 8 gigs down to my hard drive. Now this process takes about 50 minutes. I've also been able to average 6 minute burns with Decrypter going up to speeds of 12.5 x but this has also slowed down now to 1.8 x and my 6 minutes have turned into 32 minutes. Does this sound familiar to anyone? This all happened in one day which was wednesday, the day before thanksgiving and my computer hasn't been the same since. Has anybody experienced the same thing? It's hard when you're used to 3 months of kick-ass burning and then not be able to anymore. I thought it was a simple restart to fix it but i'm over that now. Appreciate the help.

[gadgetguy]

Sounds like the IDE Channel dropped back to PIO mode.

[oldandinthe way]

Gadgetguy's suggestion is a good one.

Other possibilities include dirty heads, or a dying drive.

You may have dropped into PIO mode as a result of ripping a dirty,scratched or defective disk. Unload the IDE driver and reboot. System should a find the DVD and reload driver with DMA enabled.

If this does not solve the problem - clean the drive.

[giohonam]

I got around to uninstalling the drive and having the computer reinstall it after booting up and it worked. thanks guys for your quick response. i was poking around to see what place i can check which mode it is in but i am unfamiliar of where to check this. Where would it indicate if it's in DMA or PIO mode?
BTW: I also flashed the firmware afterwards and upgraded from version 1 to 3.4. When it was in PIO mode, extracting from disc took up 50% of my CPU usage but now that I reinstalled it, it only takes up 3%. What a difference.

[guns1inger]

Right-click on My Computer and select Manage. Click on Device Manager, and then expand the IDE Controller tree. Double-click on the Primary Controller branch, then on the Advanced tab. The Trasnfer Mode field will tell you if you are using DMA (Mode 2 for optical, Mode 5 for modern HDDs). If this says PIO, you know you have a problem.

PIO mode is a fallback used by XP if it recieves a certain number of errors in a row. It assumes that the device is faulty, and unable to reliably work at DMA speeds. A variety of things can cause this. In older drives it can be a simple as ripping a badly scratched disc. Other causes include; loose IDE cables, faulty IDE cables, faulty drive HDD sharing the same IDE cable as the optical drive.

If you find the drive repeatedly falls back to PIO, start with your cables. Make sure they are seated correctly and firmly. If the optical drive shares the cable with a HDD, consider, if possible, disconnecting the HDD for a while to see if the problem stops. If it does, there is an issue with the HDD, or the way the two drives shared the cable. If it doesn't stop, replace the cable.

[giohonam]

Thanks guns1inger. Both my drives went into PIO mode. I should have checked both. The second one doesn't really matter though since it's just a cd-rom drive. But now I know where to check and my zero on the IDE does read DMA mode 2 now and i've verified it.