Hi there, Ive been battling with this problem for quite a while.
Ive got an 8x IDE DVD writer which worked perfectly fine in the beginning. Took about 13min to write a 4.7GB DVD. However at some time or other it started giving me issues. When writing a DVD in Nero the buffer level (not read buffer) fluctuate heavily, jumping from 30% to 70% and all over the show whereas before it'd stay pretty steady at around about 100%.
The result is that now writing a DVD takes almost an hour instead of 13min.

The first time I got it working properly again was after I formatted my system partition and reinstalled windows xp. It worked fine for a while then but after a bit the problem reappeared.

The Second time it came right again was after I thought it had something to do with my motherboard. I sent in the board to my supplier and they sent it back saying it was perfectly alright. After I'd put the pc back together again and redone the bios etc. it worked fine again. Then after my friend changed some bios settings to add an extra drive temporarily it went back to the old problem (even after resetting the settings to what they were before...)

Another friend told me he had a similar problem with his writer and had fixed it by settings the IDE channel transfer mode to "DMA if available" in the device manager. But its been like that on my pc all along.

Ive tried every various bios settings, exchanged the IDE cable, taken the whole pc apart and put it back together, updated my bios, etc. I'm at a bit of a dead end. Was going to format my system partition again tomorrow to see if that sets it right again. Has anyone got a clue what my problem could be? Any help would be more than appreciated..


Oh, perhaps some system specs:

Windows XP Professional
Sahara Dual +/- RW 8R + 4RW + 4R + 2RW (OEM) DVD Writer
2.4ghz Intel Pentium 4 processor
MSI 865PE Neo2 Motherboard
512MB DDR RAM
120GB Seagate HD
other hardware shouldnt really be of importance I guess...

Hi rizza, welcome to SAF

Just a thought, before we go deeply, is there enough free space on your HD to perform swapping ?

I've had some kind of buffer problems when HD space was taken by a lot of ancient restore points from Win XP... (even if a 120 GB HD must have space enough)

Chris

Edited: btw, I've heard that Nero have some bad issues when "simulation" is activated... try to disable it, if possible.

Hi and many thanks for the fast answer
My HD space is sometimes quite low. At the moment I have 5GB free space. but a week or so ago it was 10GB free and the problem was the same...
My drive is in 2 partitions. the system partition is rather small and just has windows aon it and installed programs. Because of that I shifted the swap file to the other partition which I use for storage and which has a lot more space.

Have you installed SP2 pack for your Windows XP Pro ?

Are you sure that your data transfer <Control Panel/Hardware/Device manager/IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers> is set to DMA (and not PIO) ?

Check also BIOS settings, the IDE/ATAPI setting for your DVD burner is set to "auto".

Post back if the problem persists.

Chris

Yep my primary and secondary ide are both set to DMA.
Someone else suggested settings it back to pio first, clicking ok and then resetting it to dma, Ive done that as well without any it helping.

Double checked bios settings and it is set to auto (under cmos for the drive, thats what you meant right?)

Yes... tricky problem.

have you tried to Go to <Configure/Ultrabuffer>’ and increase the buffer ?

You can also try, from nero Website, to download and run the Clean Pack and registry checker, at http://ww2.nero.com/enu/Driver_Clean_Tool_...tryChecker.html

Will scout around for more on this issue...

Chris

Yeah it is tricky.
Ive tried increasing the ultra buffer before without success...
downloaded the driver clean tool and registry checker. The clean tool says it can find no drivers to deactivate and the registry checker hence doesnt seem to do anything.

Clean tools deactivates old drivers that were known as bad for Nero.
I can not see what else may be wrong at this moment...

Will ask my son as soon as he come back from work. He use Nero to burn CDs and DVDs on his old P4 800/512, maybe he will know something more to try.

Or maybe someone else on this forum may help...

I have been using Nero for years.

Are you copying a disk, or writing data from your harddrive? It sounds from your post that you mainly have problems in copying. If so, this would indicate that you don't have enough harddrive space for Nero to copy to HDD first then re-copy to DVD.

A way to test this is to do a "Quickcopy" directly from Disk to Disk; you would have to add a DVD reader so that you had two drives; perhaps you could borrow one from a friend for an hour. If your burning completed within, say, 4 minutes, you have your answer because Nero would not have to cache to the harddrive.

No, its burning from the HD so there should be ample space...
Ive done diagnostics on my HD and RAM as well and theyre both fine...

If you get optimal performance from a clean installation, that tells me that your problem is not hardware related. With only 5 to 10 gigs available on a 120 gig hard drive I'd suspect that you're doing a lot of file manipulation other than just downloading - that amount of available disk space isn't much especially if you're moving large blocks of data. When you decide to burn a full DVD, you're going to be using that much temporary space and this means that you have almost zero space left for swap. If you have a bit of spyware (or any malware) on your system, you can run into some serious problems.

I'm not sure you have adequate space even to perform a defrag - you really need to consider ALL the administrative disk space needs - swap space is only one such need.

You might consider a different approach to the way you store all this data - I personally prefer to use smaller drives for the OS, Programs, and essential & program related data. For data storage I use larger drives and also use removable/mobile trays for better control and categorization of my data.

If you choose to make a clean installation at some point, I'd strongly recommend making a partition image of that so that you can get back to a good starting point when things go awry - it saves a lot of time. You might also want to make a log of what you have in the way of startup programs and services on the clean system and compare that to what gets added as time goes on.

You've made some good points Alfons, thank you.

Before a defrag i usually clear up my drive to the point that I have 20GB free space. I use executive software - diskeeper for my defrag runs and it recommends having at least that much free for a good defrag. But come to think of it Ive had the same problem even when Ive had 20GB free and just run a defrag.

But having said that I agree that the problem doesnt seem to be hardware related and I'll follow your advice of making an image of my system partition after my rebuild.
I'll just add my software one by one after the rebuild and use one dvd-r and write small chunks of data on it in multiple sessions after each installation to see whether there have been any effects on the buffer levels since it looks like Im not gonna find a quick-fix to this problem....

Ok, wait. It seems Ive wasted a lot of yours guys time due to my stupidity or lack of tech expertise...
I think its a DMA problem afterall.
I ran Nero info tool and it said dma is off. I uninstalled the primary ide channel which my dvd-writer sits on and rebooted. Afterwards nero info tool said dma was on and it said so in the device manager as well.
I then tried to write a dvd and the same buffer problem came up again.
After the write I ran nero info tool again and it said that dma was off again.
So for some reason it seems to kill/override the dma setting once I start a burning session...

O.K. rizza, happy your problem was solved

No problems on "wasting" our time, as there is always something we can learn or remember, even if seems obvious at tne beginning, so there's no "waste"

You are always welcome.


Chris

Thanks ironbender.

But the problem is that I havent yet solved it. As I said what happens is that after I uninstall the primary ide channel it after the reboot shows it as using dma and then switches it back to pio again. It doesnt stay on dma....

so, back to the chalkboard (me and my bad English knowledge)

Now we know where the problem is, it will be more easy to fix

Edited: Just reviewing the posts... when you say your DVD burner is set to DMA on device manager, does you have also set it on IDE channel where it is hooked on or just the burner device itself (sorry, that may be a silly question) ?

Edited again: Is your burner directly connected to the IDE channel, or is it sharing this with another device ? Is it as slave or Csel jumpered ? Is the cable 40 or 80 pins ?

QUOTE

If you have an Intel chipset based motherboard then you should not have any problems using DMA. Chipsets from other manufacturers can give you many problems, especially VIA chipset based motherboards are known to cause problems with DMA settings. In this case you should install the latest busmaster driver from the motherboard manufacturer or from the chipset manufacturer. Changing the IDE setup by moving the drive to another IDE channel may also resolve the problem.

Ok the Motherboard is intel chipset based and DVD writer is directly connected to the channel.
I have the primary IDE channel set to use dma, cant see where i would be able to set the burner itself to use it...

Have you looked on the Nero site to see if there are any updates for it?

....and you also need more available space.

Have updated Nero to the latest version and cleared up more space without any positive result.
Aside from that the files Im burning to see how the buffer is affected are 40mb at most.

Another thing. Even after I uninstall my writer and ide channel in the device manager and reboot it after the reboot shows the ide channel as being in "multi-word dma mode 2" (of course as soon as i attempt to write it goes back to pio. But surely it should be in some sort of ultra dma mode and not multi-word...?
I've changed the ide channels as well so that its on the secondary channel but again it makes no difference. Also wondered if it might have something to do with the fact that im running an ATA hard drive, but then again I dont see how..