My Sony DRU-800a is possessed!

[LordMiklos]

Gentlemen, I'm a bit of a noob with this, so help is greatly appreciated. I've had a Sony DRU-800a for about 2 years and it's really weird sometimes. Most of the time it burns at about a quarter of its top speed, (unless I've recently wiped and reinstalled windows) and the other day it completely stopped burning anything but DVD-video discs. It won't burn a data disc, it won't burn pre-converted DVD-video files, but it will burn a DVD video disc with NeroVision from the Nero 6 suite. If anyone can give me a few suggestions or share their own experiences with this model it would be really awesome.

[cdb]

Might be able to help regarding the burning speed problem. This happened to me just this past weekend.

If your drive has been reset to "PIO" instead of "DMA" access, your read/write speed will slow to 2x or so.

- Right cick on "my computer"
- click on properties, hardware tab, device manager button
- click on the + to expand the "IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers
- right click on "secondary IDE channel" (typically your HDs are on the primary channel, CD/DVD drives on secondary)
- click on "properties", "advanced settings"
- Transfer mode should always be set to "DMA if available"

If either device (if you have 2 CD/DVD drives) has a "current transfer mode" of "PIO", that's your problem. Set the transfer mode from "DMA if available" back to "PIO only" and close out of all this. Then go back in and reset it to "DMA if available", then OK etc back out.

If this change doesn't hold ("current transfer mode" always resets itself back to "PIO") there's a registry change you can make to force Windows to rescan the drive and try DMA again. If I can find the link I'll post it, but you have to be comfortable with editing the registry to do that.

As far as DVD Video only (can't burn DATA), aside from trying another burning program, I can't help you there.

[cdb]

You can get the drive out of PIO mode by doing this:

Open regedit and find this key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Class\{4D36E96A-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}

Under this there should be two subfolders 0001 and 0002 which correspond to the primary and secondary IDE channels.

Inside both folders you should find MasterIdDataChecksum and SlaveIdDataChecksum (only there if you have two drives on the channel.) Double-click on the appropriate one of these checksums (depending on which one the offending drive is assigned to) and delete the value assigned to it. Reboot and then Windows should redect the drive's DMA.

If I remember correctly, Windows keep track of any errors that occur with the drive, and after so many errors takes it out of DMA mode and puts it in PIO. It then keeps you from changing back to DMA mode until these values are deleted from the registry.

[LordMiklos]

Gentlemen, my burner is working again, although not at top speed. It took 50 minutes to burn a 3.2 GB disc. Still slow is better than not at all. Thank you for your advice