Going insane!

[Brainfire]

Right, make a cup of tea, sit in front of your PC, and prepare for a brain buster!

I bought a Pioneer A06 DVD-RW a few weeks back… just couldn’t get the thing to work properly at all – 4 different types of discs, reinstalled windows, 6 different types of burning software… no joy. It would write the odd disc ok, but the majority of them were total crap – patches on the surface of the disk (which caused them to lock up in any DVD player) or it would just lock up sometimes while burning. I couldn’t get it to write a multisession CD at all….power calibration error every time. Ok, power calibration error is one of two things, right? Bad media, or, the laser is faulty on the writer (it would happily write multisession DVD’s all day long though).

Eventually I gave up and sent it back as faulty – the supplier tested it and reported it as ok! Since I work in that kind of job myself, I know that time and cost considerations don’t really allow you to test the returns exhaustively. I argued the point with them and eventually got my refund less 15% restocking charge (what a pile of shit that is).
Bought a brand new MSI DVD-RW with 8Mb buffer from my own place of employment and banged it in ASAP, overjoyed that I would get to watch my HDD full of movies on my player at last – guess what? Exactly the same! Worse probably... The first disc seemed to go ok but locked up in the player after about 2 mins… the second one, DVD Decrypter apparently wrote ok. Popped it in the DVD player and after 20 mins….locked up! Took the disc out and looked at the surface of it… only 20 mins of data written on the disc… the only thing I noticed was that when DVD Decrypter is set to AUTO for the burn speed, it burns at two speed, not four speed. The other thing that happens sometimes is that it burns the disc but puts the chapters in the wrong order… end of film first, then middle etc….
Unless anyone has any other ideas, I’d say it was data getting corrupted during transfer from the HDD somehow, would anyone go along with this? The HDD is on a RAID controller on its own and I’ve never had any problems with it at all – the other niggling thing is that when I put my old 12x burner back in it will write multisession CD’s no problem.

Anyone with a sure fire answer will be rewarded with coins of the Realm, cuz my head is bursting now…

[SergeantD]

You could be doing a many number of things wrong. You need to give more info however, like how it is hooked up to your HD, burning software etc......

[Brainfire]

Burning software tried up to this point:

Nero 6
Nero 5.5.10
DVD Decrypter
CopyToDVD
InstantCopy 8
ImgTool
Ulead DVD Workshop V 2.0

Hardware:

MSI nforce M/B
AMD XP2400+
2 x 512Mb Kingston DDR PC2100
3 x 120Gb Maxtor Diamondmax 120Gb HDD's
MSI 16x DVD
MSI 4x DVD-RW
GeForce 3 Pro

The drive with the images on it is on the RAID controller on its own, but I've tried moving a couple of the images to a drive on a standard IDE with the same results. The writer is on the secondary IDE as master with one of the HDD's as slave (yes, I've tried it on it's own). I've even disabled the onboard RAID and banged in a PCI RAID card, and have also swapped out the memory for an OEM DDR stick. And before anyone says it, yes, I've got the latest drivers for everything, including the M/B chipset. In between my first post and this one it wrote what appears to be three perfect DVD's....and the last one about five minutes ago comes out full of 'patches' and just locks up the DVD player. Consistency is not the name of the game in this household - nor is bloody patience! I've ran out of ideas now... looks like it's gonna have to be a 'swap the M/B' job as a last resort. What I really don't get is how the DVD buffer always shows full and it takes the full 15 minutes to write a 'complete' disk... which really only has about 25% of the data on it.... I'm off to bed... do you blame me?