Pioneer A04 Problem

[hydrant29]

Would appreciate assistance. Installed new A04 DVR and until I learn how to use it have been trying to just burn cds. Experiencing two initial problems, though. Using the Prassi prog I was successful with two cds but then on the third and all future attempts, the drive and entire system freezes when Pioneer is "initializing" and I need to reboot to eject the disc!! Switching to my old Easy CD Creator prog, that will not even recognize the Pioneer drive when Creator is in the "burn" mode. However, when I then switch to the "Disc to disc copy" mode, Creator recognizes the Pioneer as well as my original HP drive... but Pioneer still freezes during"initializing" if I use it as the "recorder' and the HP as the "reader". Latest problem-just trying to "read' a cd, Pioneer freezes! Any thoughts/suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[Anonymous65]

I had the same problem.

I removed the jumper on the drive saying the drive is a master drive (my A04 is a master on the secondary IDE interface). I have had problems with hard drives before when they were jumpered as a master when there were no slave present. So, simply remove the little rubber jumper telling the drive it is a master and leave all the jumpers open.

Also, in the Windows Device settings menu under CD-ROM, you might check and uncheck some of the options in the settings menu.

[Anonymous65]

Reading other posts, turning ON DMA support for the A04 seems to do the trick.

[crjackson]

Okay, I had a problem like this with mine as well. I didn't try removing the MASTER jumper though.

I run WinXP-Pro and I know of 2 ways to fix the problem. Firstly though this assumes that you have the drive configured on it's own IDE ribbon, with no other drives attached.

1) Enter inot the BIOS setup screen and disable UDMA-Automatic. With this being done, WinXP will place the drive into Multi-Word DMA mode. It work fine for me.

2) Go into the control panel and change the controller settings from DMA to PIO mode.

It's a known problem with this drive when installed on many systems both VIA/INTEL chipsets...