Problem/Question on my (Dell) GRA-4120B burner

[tfrazier]

Hi All,

OK, This Dual layer burner came in my Dell 8400 about 10 months ago. It's always burned at 1.4x regardless of media used. It takes about 50 min to burn a movie and the same amount of time to burn a full data DVD.

The drive died last week and Dell sent me a new one to replace it. The new one burned at 8x! I was thrilled. I never really saw much use in speed, but now that I had it, I saw what I had been missing.

About 2 days after the new drive was onboard, it now burns at 1.4x like the old one did . I've worked with Dell online, but I can tell they keep walking me thru steps for "DVD burner not working" as opposed to a speed issue.

I am still working thru the same 50pk spindle of Verbatim DVD+R 1x-8x DVDs that I have had for months (MCC...003.8 ) . They were 1.4 on the old drive, 8x on the new drive, and now 1.4x on the new drive. I see people getting 4x and 8x on this media, nobody getting as low a burn rate as me.

I only use DVDDecriptor (.iso) and CDBurnerXP (data) to burn and there have been no changes to the software thru all this.

Any help or suggestions would be appreiciated

Thanks,
Tim

Dell 8400
P4 3.2ghz
3gb DDR2 533mhz

[chas0039]

Your problem sounds like a DMA PIO issue. Go to your sytem properties/hardware/device manager tab and check the properties for your IDE connections. They should be DMA if possible and nothing should be PIO. Something is resetting this as you have had 8X and then it went to 1.4X. The most common reason for this is bad reading media where Windows slows down and switches to PIO. I also have seen this problem with a burner and HD on the same IDE connection. Search google for PIO and DMA problems and you will see a ton of advice. Usually you have to switch things around a lot and do some work in the registry.

[tfrazier]

Thank-You! Thank-You! Thank-You!

I found some stuff on google on this as you'd suggested. It seems that when the device encounters a problem with bad media or some other substandard read condition, it will switch over to PIO mode and will stay there indefinatley.

It seems the only way to rectify this (That I could find) was to delete the Primary IDE controller and reboot. It sounds scary and maybe I was dumb to do it, but my boot partition was on a serial ATA drive, so I figured what the heck.....anyway, the box comes back up, sees there's an IDE device on the controller and reinstalls the drivers/device. It then sets it up as Current Transfer mode=Ultra DMA Mode 2 (for my device anyway). And away I go burning at 8x speed!!!

My old drive must have dropped back to PIO mode shortly after I got it and I never really looked into it, so when my new (replacement) drive came in, it was installed as new so it got DMA mode until I tried reading a bad disk and it switched to PIO.

Thanks sooo much for taking a few min out on an Easter morning to help me!!!

Thanks,
Tim

[chas0039]

Glad to help. I have had the same thing happen. And I know how frustrating it can be.