Imgburn Device Buffer

[wulf109]

All of a sudden Imgburn's device buffer is fluctuating wildly and burns on BD are taking over two hours instead of twenty minutes.

[johns0]

I had a similar problem and found it was dodgy discs,about 10 in a row were doing that,i tried other burning programs with the same results,try a different batch of discs,if that fails then your burner might be failing.

Also make sure your drive isn't in pio mode.If it is uninstall it so it goes back to dma mode.

[wulf109]

I suspect my BD burner,a Lite-on,is failing. I tried to burn a DVDR with the same result. I then burned a DVDR in my LG combo drive and it burned normally. Sadly my combo drive doesn't burn BD's. The LG combo rips BR and HD-DVD but only burns DVD's.

[johns0]

Its unusual for both lasers to go faulty at the same time,did you check to see if it was in pio mode?

[wulf109]

You are correct,one of my IDE controllers was in PIO mode. I deleled it and restarted XP and it's in DMA5 mode and burns are normal. Many thanks. Could changing to PIO mode be caused by a virus? MalwarebytesPro reported a virus today for the first time in years.

[johns0]

In winxp if the burner/player really struggles with a disc it will automatically drop to pio mode but won't return to dma,its just a winxp thing,nothing you can do to prevent it.

The virus report could be a false flag,hard to say.

[jman98]

Dropping to PIO mode in XP is a known bug/feature. It's a "feature" if you work for Microsoft. It's bug to everybody else in the world. But Microsoft did deliberately design XP to do this so from their point of view it's doing exactly what they wanted it to do. The real question is whether this decision of theirs was the right one or not. I think not.

Basically almost anything under normal operation can generate what XP considers to be some kind of error with regards to the use of the burner. The problem is that XP has an error counter and the default value is really low so it's a lot easier than you might think for the error counter value to be exceeded from the default value. Once that happens, XP craps itself and goes into a panic and sets the burner to PIO mode. I can sort of understand this in that I get that most Windows users lack the technical skills needed to deal with this problem so putting the drive in PIO as some kind of fallback position does allow it to continue to work, just painfully slowly. It probably saves some calls to Microsoft support as the burner does still work. However, as I pointed out, in my opinion XP set this counter value too low and having the default exceeded is maybe 99% of the time not really indicative of a true problem. What Microsoft should have done is set the default value to this counter much higher, but they didn't. One solution I've used in the past under XP is to go into the registry and set the value of the counter to FFFFFFFF which is so high in hexadecimal that it will essentially never be reached and XP won't ever reset the burner to PIO mode. There are other methods of dealing with this problem such as the delete the controller and restart XP solution you used.