I've been asking for a lot of help lately and figured I'd post what went wrong in hope to help some other people.
My main problem was that immediately or shortly after I began a burning cycle I would receive an I/O error and some type of Semaphore timeout.
It turns out that the combination of my OS (windows XP) and USB 2.0 was not compatible with my external burner. Maybe everyone here knew this, but I had to do a lot of searching to find this?
Quote:You recieve this error when you try to burn with DVD Decrypter with a USB 2.0 connected burner.
The ALI's are the main culprit. It's some kind of weird combination between the XP, since ME appears to be unaffected, drivers, USB 2.0 onboard connections, and the ALI PCI to USB bridge chips. When installed internally on an IDE connection or when connected to a PCI USB 2.0 card, it seems to work fine. I've verified the IDE connection fix myself, as have others, here and in other forums. I've connected the card and just need to swap around the cable and put the drive back in the enclosure to test. Connecting by FireWire also seems to work, but, I don't have FireWire to test with. Oh, and, USB 1.x works, even when connected to the mobo, i.e. a 1.x hub connected to the 2.0 mobo port. BUT, you get speeds at less than 1x that way, so, that answer, while it works, is not very practical.
So far, we've only been able to see the problem occur under ALI bridge chips. My drive has one, and at least 2 or 3 others who can verify their chips have shown us that those who have the problem are ALI bridges and those that have verified their working chips aren't ALI's. Plus, when removed from the ALI drive enclosures and put on other chips or used internally as IDE's, they work. So, thus far, the ALI chip has been our main culprit to focus on.
Sure enough, I successfully burned a movie and CD on my parent?s computer which is USB 1, I have USB 2. I tried the same exact burns on the computer in my room and got the error.
So to make a long story short after a week of trying to figure out what the hell was going on, I took back my external mad dog burner and plan on getting an internal sometime this week. Any suggestions? I?m looking at?
Now days though most drives are going to work well the LiteOn is just a more dependable drive IMO.
Drives I have or have owned (I will just list the Manufactures as I have had to many models to list) This is the order I would rate them
LiteOn - Mainly for dependibility and price
Pioneer
Plextor - These are great, but for price LiteOn is just as good
NEC
Samsung
BusLink
Sony
ASUS - The jury is still out on this one
HP
Right now I am using an ASUS DRW1608 P3S, but I can already tell I don't like it as well as my LiteOn's.
All of these companies make decent drives I can't really say any of them are junk, but I can say with a good consious that the LiteOn's have been the best threw the years for me.
Good luck with your new drive
PS it is always better to go for the internal drive vs. the external drive if you can (they work better)
My Guides--------->http://webpages.charter.net/bacitup/
Newbies------------>http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/183136
Software ------->http://webpages.charter.net/bacitup/software.htm
