DVD burning issues in Windows XP

[digitalboots]

I'm having burning issue with Windows Xp.

My computer configuration:
- Athlon 550 CPU
- ASUS K& motherboard - AMD 751 Irongate North Bridge (AGP bus, PCI bus and memory bus), and the VIA VT82C686A South Bridge (IDE Controller, Audio, etc)
- LG GSA-4040B burner, with A3400 firmware (factory install, not flash upgraded), on secondary IDE as master, no other devices, running in UDMA Mode 2 (can't get it any higher)
- I'm using the default IDE device drivers installed with Windows XP Service Pack 1 (integrated), neither the VIA 4-in-1 nor VIA multiport drivers (tho I've successfully installed both to see if I could fix the problem...)



Nero Burning Rom 6 refuses to work in DMA mode. I have to switch the secondary IDE channel to PIO mode in the device settings to get Nero to work otherwise in UDMA mode it just sits at "Caching of files started" with "Total Time" elapsed 1 second. This is in either smulation or write mode. The computer hangs at this point and I have to reboot to get out of Nero.

Obviously I want to run in DMA mode, not PIO, so I've removed Nero 6 and installed RecordNow DX. I successfully burned three DVD-R videos, writing a data DVD in RecordNow DX with the AUDIO_TS and VIDEO_TS directories. I burnt one last night successfully, put a fresh disc in to burn another, but all of a sudden I am now getting an error a second or two after hiting "next" to write which states that a problem occurred writing to the disc. I checked the event log which states the IMAPI service started successfully and the next entry states that the IMAPI service ended. huh? So, I disabled the IMAPI service in Services (as I did when trying to get Nero to work, which didn't help that either, BTW). I rebooted and tried burning again in RecordNow DX. Now I get the error instantly, not after a second or two, that the burn encountered a failure. I checked the event log and there is a DCOM error now that states the IMAPI service failed to initiate. This leads me to believe that RecordNow DX requires the Windows XP IMAPI service to work correctly. Why, though, did it burning in RecordNow DX work and then all of a sudden stop working? I've made no system configuration changes between the time I burnt a disc successfully and the next time, a minute later, I tried to burn one which has since failed every time...?

I've done a clean fresh install of Windows Xp, and have no other burning software installed. I've disabled on-the-fly writing to the drive in the drive properties as well, and nothing I do seems to help this new problem which mysteriously appeared. I'm using Ritek G03 DVD-Rs, and I've burned a couple successfully so I know it's not a media problem.

Can anyone help getting RecordNow DX working again? Or perhaps help me get Nero 6 working in DMA mode?


thanks in advance,
Gord

[digitalboots]

oops, a couple of typeos...
that's a "K7" motherboard, and firmware "A300" for the dvd burner

[MOVIEGEEK]

Try ForceASPI Drivers and update the write engine:http://support.sonic.com/downloads/engine.asp
You might be stuck with PIO on your system,VIA 686/694 chipsets are buggy.

[digitalboots]

thanks, I'll give the forceaspi drivers a try, but not sure I follow your comment about being stuck in PIO mode since RecordNow DX is writing in DMA mode (with the WinXP IMAPI service...) *shrug*

[digitalboots]

so I installed ForceASPI and the latest APSI drivers (4.71.2), and no change. I've already got the latest update of the write engine for RecordNow DX, installed when I installedhte program, have been using it all along.

Any other suggestions?