WinXP Pro can't use external drive when burning CD/DVDs

[kenray]

I have an unusual problem.I have xp pro sp2 on a laptop with 2 external
firewire harddrives for storage.
I have only 1 1394a port so I chain the second drive,an inoi,through the first drive,a bytecc.
XP handles both drives well,even when rebooting.The problem occurs when
I try to burn.As soon as I press the burn button,I instantly get a "delayed write failed"error for that drive.The drive is no longer accessable even though the first drive is fine.I run chkdsk and no problem.
Sometimes the drive letter stays in windows explorer,but if I try to access it,it causes a hard lockup.Rebooting will bring it back.My event viewer shows the same 2 errors;ntfs event id 55 and spb2port event id 9.
I use nero version 6.6.0.1 and alcohol 1.9.2.happens with both.Before
and after clean install.

Anybody got a clue.Thanks.

 

[pkellmey]

You are probably bottlenecking the port because your laptop CPU can't keep up and so the drive times out waiting for a process response. Once firewire times out, it rarely comes back without a reboot. If you burn without connecting the extra drives, it will probably not have as much of an issue.

 

[kenray]

that makes sense as the error message in the event viewer for the sbp2port says "the device did not respond within the timeout period".the processor is a 2.4ghz p4.

so first,do you think it's because i have 2 drives daisy chained,because only the second drive is effected.i can burn fine with the 1.

and second,is there any way to change the timeout parametersfor the port .

thanks again.

 

[pkellmey]

The daisy chain is one of the issues because it has to fight through the chain I/O to process a return response. I have only limited experience with this issue, but I've never seen increasing the timeouts in the registry to do anything other than slow down performance when you're not using the other drives. Maybe someone else knows a better way to fix this issue, however I know that the better the CPU/FSB the less issue you will have.