Im New & Need info on a dvd drive not burning properly

[BiZzZzaaR]

Hey Everybody, I just happened to find this board a few days ago. I was using it to help me convert video to dvd. That worked well, but i am having a new problem now. My DVD burning drive is not burning at the correct speed it should. my drive supports up to 16x, but when i go to burn it is only burning at 0.75x. It'll take 3 hours to burn a dvd-r. Something isnt right. Now this is a new computer with a pentium 4 processor, and the DVD-r i bought support up to 16x. Not to mention i have already burned several DVD-rs with this drive and had no problems. this is all of a sudden and i dont know what to do. Can anyone help me out please?

[redwudz]

The first thing I would check is if the DVD drive has changed to PIO mode from the standard DMA.

To check DMA/PIO mode within Windows:

Control Panel>System>Hardware>Device Manager>IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers.

From there, right click on one of the channels and choose 'Properties>Advanced Settings'. All drives should be DMA mode. The 'Current Transfer Mode' for Hard drives is usually DMA 4-6 and DVD burners DMA 2-4, DVD ROMs usually DMA 2. If you see any in PIO mode, that can slow things down.

Changing them back may be easy or complicated. First see if you can change them in that window. If not, I usually right click on the channel the drive is on and uninstall the channel, then let the OS reinstall it by rebooting the computer. This will not damage any files on the computer.

From there, if no luck, get back to us.

And welcome to our forums.

[Trident5]

one big thing to keep in mind is just because your media says its 16x doesnt mean your burner well run it at 16x. try differnt media if you find one that well run at 16x i would write the name down and stick with it.

[CrayonEater]

One other thing, too - make sure no disk-intensive applications running. If you're doing some kind of disk-intensive work, that will slow things down or even create coasters as your DVD software is competing for disk access. Some anti-virus and anti-spyware software are set to scan whenever the disk as been idle for X amount of time.

[BiZzZzaaR]

one big thing to keep in mind is just because your media says its 16x doesnt mean your burner well run it at 16x. try differnt media if you find one that well run at 16x i would write the name down and stick with it.

The Drive does burn at 16x i forgot to mention that.

I am going to try what redwudz said and see if that works. Thankyou

and Crayoneater What is Disk intensive Work? what would that refer to..

When i burn a cd any CD or DVD, i always shut everything i can off.

[CrayonEater]

Virus-scanning is pretty disk-intensive. Your HD runs just about constantly. If you've got a BitTorrent or USENET client downloading away in the background, that'll also slow you up quite a bit. Of course, if you have a malware bot running on your system, then somebody may be downloading off of YOU too. Especially in 16X burns, which run pretty close to the limits of most consumer-grade hard disk setups, anything that interferes with your disk activity may slow down burns A LOT!

As others have mentioned, check your drive configurations - cables, etc. Generally, you want your DVD burner to be a Master on the Secondary EIDE bus, and set up for UDMA-2 or better. Redwudz explained how to check the UDMA setting (Click Control Panel>System>Hardware>Device Manager>IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers). Also, however, when you are in the Device Manager, after looking at IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers, also look at the DVD/CD-ROM Drives item by right-clicking your drive and selecting Properties. If it says the drive's location is 0 (0) then you are ok, otherwise, you should go inside the case and set the jumper on your DVD burner to Master (and, if necessary, set whatever else is on the cable to Slave. If you only have 1 HD, set the HD as the Master on the Primary Channel and the DVD Drive as the Master on the Secondary Channel. Your motherboard or manual should tell you which connector is Primary and which is Secondary.

[BiZzZzaaR]

Thankyou Everybody. What Redwudz Said Worked. That was one thing i would have never thought of!

[redwudz]

Good deal. It's a common problem. Windows XP downgrades the Ultra DMA transfer mode after receiving more than six consecutive CRC errors from a drive. If you were having trouble reading a disc and the next time you use the drive, it runs very slow, it's first thing to check. Unfortunately, it won't reset by itself. And sometimes it won't reset by uninstalling the controller, then you have to do a registry modification.

[BiZzZzaaR]

Yeah i havent gotten that far into computers yet.. I know how to fix a little but not very much..