Buffer under run-tried everything

[kipperfoot]

I am using a P2- 350, with an old HP6020 writer. I am burning using Nero 5.x.x.x I have 350 meg of memory-and am burning at 1 speed. I have defragged drives, used win solo, so nero is the only application running,taken read ahead down to zero for my hard drives.

Searched every forum, tried everything, but I always get buffer underrun errors.

Is there anything else I can try?

[Mario]

I hate to tell you this but you might have to get a new writer. If you have looked at any new ones try and pick out one with the new "Burn Proof" you will never see that nasty messg again?

[patrickm]

1- turn OFF DMA and autoinsert on your cd-r drive.
2- place it on a separate IDE channel from your HDD.

before you buy a new drive, you might try fixing this one yourself. if the buffer underruns tend to occur in the first 30% of so of writing, try it. you only need two things- a screwdriver and some high-heat non-stick non-corrosive silicon grease. it's simpler than you'd think. just disassemble the shell of the drive until you can see the laser head's track mechanism. it'll look like a long screw that acts like a guide to position the head. just spread the grease along the track, and move the laser assembly back and forth along it with your hand to spread it out evenly. i had a samsung (ricoh) 6x drive that did this, and after greasing it, it works stably at 2x and 4x, which means there's another problem, but it's sure better than throwing it out...

if you're drive fails at the end of its write, check out this link
http://www.cdmediaworld.com/hardware/cdrom/cd_class_action.shtml
there's a class action lawsuit against HP over those drives, since this problem is much harder to fix.

[Greg12]

de-fragment your hard drive.

Sometimes, this can cause underuns.

Also, reduce to the lowest burn speed possible.

[DVD Master]

BUY A NEW COMPUTER IF YOU CAN..............................

[menaz]

What is the speed of your Hard drive? I am 99% sure that is the problem. If it is an ATA-33 drive, it is way too slow, if its packed, it makes it slower and if it is 5400 rpm=you cant burn anything. Prefarably, the HD you are burning from shouldnt have the OS in it, and it shouldnt have the windows swap file in it either. It should also be in a different IDE channel than the burner.

[bkoyle]

buy a burner with burn proof

[patrickm]

<TABLE BORDER=0 ALIGN=CENTER WIDTH=85%><TR><TD><font size=-1>Quote:</font><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR><TR><TD><FONT SIZE=-1><BLOCKQUOTE>
On 2001-08-04 18:21:57, menaz wrote:
What is the speed of your Hard drive? I am 99% sure that is the problem. If it is an ATA-33 drive, it is way too slow, if its packed, it makes it slower and if it is 5400 rpm=you cant burn anything. Prefarably, the HD you are burning from shouldnt have the OS in it, and it shouldnt have the windows swap file in it either. It should also be in a different IDE channel than the burner.
</BLOCKQUOTE></FONT></TD></TR><TR><TD><HR size=1 color=black></TD></TR></TABLE>

are you kidding? 5400 RPM ATA33 not enough? he can't even burn at 1x. and it's actually worse to split a drive in half an put the swap on C and the image on D, since it's physically still the same drive and the heads still have to move long distances. (yes, it's clearly preferable to burn off a 2nd phyical hard disk though). i burn off my 5400 RPM ATA33 system disk all the time at 4x onto RW's.

if he can't burn an image at 1x off any DMA-enabled hard disk, the problem is that his drive is physically defective, and it's a known problem with those drives. the lubrication on the track dries up and the laser sticks, and the spring problem compounds it by stiffening over time, and ruins the damping mechanism.

[dwslah]

You have to be kidding! The problem is not with his drive or burner. It's in the conversion to Mpeg. The proof is in the Basic multiplex. If you test a file by using Basic multiflex after conversion, If it is going to have buffer underflow problems after multiplexing it will tell you how many and 9 times out of 10 the most buffer underflow's occure in the second half of the file. I don't know what the cure is but I had this problem and I have not taken a screwdrive to my system to correct it. The trick is to find out what the proper setting for your audio to video setting need to be, depending on the file you started with. Remember rule of thumb no 1 If you didn't creat the origanel file, you can't depend on it being correct.

Reconvert using the correct setting, What is the correct setting? Well you could have it correct settings but if your origanal file was created incorrectly or differently than standard, Who Knows what the correct setting is??? I found that trying to burn a Pal file in NTSC will almost always give me Buffer underflow problems. I tried this with Swordfish.avi and recieved 19980 buffer underflows. Basic Multiplex told me. I did how ever convert the file correctly and the file works fine. I hope that this helps and I'm not to late......

[patrickm]

wait, you do realize the difference between "buffer underrun" when burning a disc and "buffer underflow" when muxing a stream, right?

and i don't have any idea what you mean about "burning a PAL file in NTSC". in terms of layout, both are exactly the same file structure on the disc. (yes, obviously the MPEG standards are different, but if you have a compliant file you have a compliant file, you can't burn an NTSC file into a PAL file or vice versa)



<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: patrickm on 2001-08-12 14:49:37 ]</font>

[paul_tp]

Know that some people think this is a silly thing to say, but Have you tried burning at at 2speed?

I have the same problem with the vivastar CD`s burnt at 1 speed, buffer underrun, 2 speed works a treat.

Paul

[koinhelgo]

I agree toatlly with Paul, some versions of nero have problems at burning at 1 speed, especially if you have other softwares vxd files installed.
So burn at 2 speed and you should get results.
For example I cannot possibly burn with NERO at 1 speed on my sons computer- even if I close all tasks and burn on first start, the burner is SCSI too so should just be a case of spitting out data to a different line.

[Psycho_Dad_Rules]

Hi,

Maybe this helps (Or atleast clear some stuff up.)
First of all, try another burn program. Prefferably CDRWin from http://www.goldenhawk.com
This is one of the smallest burning programs, plus it doesn't need any external files. (the installed version can be run from a floppy.) Because of this fact it wil burn like a charm even if other burn programs conflict. So if this does work it's just an installation problem, nothing wrong with the burner.

Also (if you're able) try the burner in a different PC. If this also doesn't work, there probably something wrong with the burner itself. The cleaning or stuff like that might solve things.

At least this way you have an idea of what to do.

Greetz,

pSyChO dAd

[kipperfoot]

I never got to the root of the problem. I tried a couple of different burning programs and tried burning at a higher speed. I will try the greasing the arm. It's an external burner so changing the IDE port won't help! Anyway I bought a LITEON 12 speed burner from my local shop for 75 quid, burnproof, and it works every time (bargain)...

Will post if greasing arm works! Thanks all for suggestions.

John

[Nitehawkzz]

I have a similar problem, but I don't think it's a hardware problem. I have split a divX movie and encoded both files with TMPGEnc with the same settings. I burnt one perfectly but the other has buffer underrun errors at about 30% writing done. I have re-encoded a few times but still have the same problems.]
I might try running the bad file through DivXFix and see if that helps. The file plays fine on my PC.

Anyone else got any ideas?

[Nitehawkzz]

Well I managed to burn that file I was having trouble with. I changed the buffer settings in Nero from auto to manual and set it to 60MB. But now this file seems to have an audio sync problem and the other half doesn't.........?????

[Craig Fuqua]

What helped me the most was turning my CD read-ahead optimization off. [right-click on My Computer, Performance tab, File System, CD-ROM, set "optimize access pattern" to "No Read Ahead."]
I found this advice on the Hewlitt-Packard website. Like you, I was burning from the HD, not copying from a CD, but it still made a difference.


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Craig Fuqua on 2001-08-15 06:24:48 ]</font>

[alaric]

I had a similar experience with a Pinnacle Micro CDR drive and found that it just wouldn't work with a lot of the newer CDR discs. I found that if I tried different discs I could find brands that worked (and it worked perfectly every time with these discs), but it got increasingly hard to find discs it liked and I finally replaced it with a Plextor (best Money I ever spent).

So replacing it was probably the best move,

Richard