Pioneer 105, Win XP slow burning.

[nath]

For some reason, over the last couple of days my burner has been struggling to get up to 4x. I've no idea why - tried rebooting, no joy. Tried a few different brands of disc, all of which should work at 4, no joy.

This happened a while back on my previous win xp installation and a format/reinstall fixed it but I'd rather avoid that if possible. Any ideas anyone?


Edit: tried Nero and Alcohol, both do the same.. just noticed that in Alcohol it struggles to keep the memory buffer at 100%. I'm not doing anything memory intenstive, only got mIRC, firefox and Outlook open.

Ngh.

 

[Doomy]

Do you smoke?

 

[Tom]

Try cleaning the lens.

 

[Doomy]

I had exactly the same errors occuring and after a while it wouldnt even start a burn off. The r105 (same as me) is notorious for drawing smoke and dust thru the unit across the lens due to the placement of the fan. I did some research and just before giving up on the drive i opened it up and carefully swabbed the lens with a cotton bud stick and put it back together. It works, sometimes it doesnt want to do 4x but 2x always works.

Apparently being a smoker with a r105 has the life expectency of 1 year.

For the drive naturally

 

[babs]

Check the properties for the DMA channel it's using in the device manager. It may well be operating in PIO mode whereas it should be using DMA.

 

[nath]

I'm not a smoker, so that's one thing. It could be the dust, so I'll try cleaning the lens. I just found out that I had this crappy StarForce copy protection crap on my system, that could have been messing with it.

And Babs, colour me stupid but I can't find any DMA settings for the Pioneer in dev manager. Where should I be looking?

 

[babs]

In Dev manager View > Devices by connection. Expand the top branch until you see IDE channels mentioned and view the properties for the channel itself, not the devices connected to them. Under the advanced settings tab you should see the 2 devices mentioned, and their PIO/DMA status below.

 

[Doomy]

In Dev manager View > Devices by connection. Expand the top branch until you see IDE channels mentioned and view the properties for the channel itself, not the devices connected to them. Under the advanced settings tab you should see the 2 devices mentioned, and their PIO/DMA status below.

Its always DMA as default in XP tho. Unless you changed those Settings yourself id be surprised if they werent.

 

[Xavier]

Dare I suggest it nath, but StarForce?

Has it improved since removing it?

Xav

 

[nath]

If anything, its gotten worse. I seem to be burning at 1.6x on 4x discs now. It's infuriating. The buffer usage is maxed out, cpu usage is all the way down. Perhaps they're just duff discs. So annoying.

 

[babs]

have you tried anything suggested here?

 

[nath]

Haven't cleaned the lens, but I checked the DMA settings and all is well. Things seem to be burning ok now. Could be, as I said, duff media.