Someone please help me

[Spankster]

I just recently upgraded my computer. I got an Antec Sonata case (360W power supply), an ABIT NF7-S motherboard, two sticks of Micron DDR333 memory and an nVidia GeForce4 Ti 4200. I put in my current 80GB WD special edition hard drive (8MB cache) and my current AthlonXP 1900+.

Here's my problem. My CD burner doesn't burn CD's. It's an LG GCE-8400B, 40X max burner with underrun protection. I've had it for a year or so and have never had a problem (on my old ASUS A7V system). Here are the symptoms. I was trying to burn an audio CD, it'll start just fine but then at some point during the burn process it'll sort of freeze. The computer doesn't freeze, and the burning software seems to be going still but the progress bar stops completely and if you watch the task manager, the processor load goes to zero when it freezes (from somewhere in the 10's of percent usage). I can end task the burner software, but it never really ends and I have to reboot to get the system back to normal. I first saw this problem with Easy CD Creator 5.0 Platinum, but have since uninstalled this and tried it with Nero 6.0 as well. Exact same result. Here's the odd thing. It'll freeze at a different point in the burn process each time I try, but it'll always freeze before finishing.

Anyone have any thoughts? I'm running Windows XP Pro, SP1. In my old setup I was running all the same software, but without SP1. I'm guessing perhaps the memory or the motherboard? This is already the second NF7-S I've tried (because of another problem). My memory is running at DDR266 in dual channel mode. I can run the SiSoft benchmarks on memory and processor without any apparent problems, and the system seems rock solid stable in all other regards.

This problem is driving me crazy, anyone else ever experienced a similar problem?

Thanks,
Mike

 

[EdtheROM]

check the dma settings.

Change it from whatever it is and see what happens

I've seen this problem a lot.

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-=ed

 

[lqdpress]

XP seems to want to be your only software for burning.... The same thing happened to me with my HP scanner. I abandoned the HP software and just used XP's scanner controls. You might be able to do the same with XP's burning contols (if your using XP Pro)

 

[Spankster]

Thanks for the info, it did lead me to the solution. First, went to the IDE controller in device manager and looked at the settings for the controller. The master device is the CD drive, running in Multi-word DMA2 mode. There was also a Seagate Travan tape drive as slave on the same channel, running in PIO mode.

Setting the CD to PIO mode (or any other slower DMA mode) did not fix the problem, but it got me thinking. I did find a few sites on the internet that suggest that you cannot run a DMA device and a PIO device together on the same channel.

So, I unplugged my tape drive and that fixed the problem. It's odd, because the tape drive does work just fine as a slave on the same channel as the CD drive, but apparently it prevents the CD drive from working.

Well, I guess this gives me the excuse I've been looking for to get a nice USB2 external hard drive to do my backups from now on.

Thanks for the help!
Mike