Strange symptoms with NEC ND3520A DVD-RW

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Strange symptoms with NEC ND3520A DVD-RW

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MiniFoo

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8. July 2005 @ 13:13

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I recently bought the drive mentioned from NewEgg OEM, without instructions, software, or packaging. I figured that all I would need to do is plug it in, have XP auto-detect it, then update the firmware, and voila, new DVD burner.

And that's basically how it went. I had a DVD-ROM drive before (that's what I was replacing) and a CD-RW drive, along with Roxio Easy CD Creator that came with the Dell. At first, Roxio didn't recognize the DVD-RW as a burner, so I installed a friend's copy of Nero to see if there was something wrong with the hardware, but lo and behold, Nero recognized it. So I uninstalled Roxio and kept with Nero. (Also note that I was Alchohol 120% for virtual drives when I had Roxio.)

Now here's the strange part. I got four good burns out of it before I got my first coaster, which stopped at 76%. "That's strange," I thought, and I tried it again, same type of media, same data. Another coaster, same stopping place. Surely this isn't a problem with the media... these are Verbatim DVD+Rs, good quality stuff. I tried burning an audio CD-R with my other burner... worked fine. I put DVD-ROMS and DVD-Video discs in the DVD-RW, and they read flawlessly from start to finish. I check my harddrive, and then take the time to fully defragment it (it was pretty messy before, so I thought that would solve the problem). Nope. I try different data, thinking that *for some odd reason* the avis I was trying to archive where corrupt.

Well, two days and six coasters later, all of which stopped at the same point, I say to myself "I'm not wasting these discs, they cost a lot. I'm gonna to simulations instead." But alas, I can't for some reason; I can only do speed tests in Nero. Whatever.

Y'know what? I'm babbling. Here are the symptoms:

1. In Windows Explorer, drive shows up as DVD-RW. When I put in a factory-CD/blank-CD-R/factory-DVD, AutoRun goes as normal, and it detects it. When I put in a DVD+/-R, the drive magically "turns into" a CD-Rom drive.

2. When the problem started occuring, the buffer levels would go crazy, jumping from 6% to 82% to 45% to 93% and so on randomly. The DMA would also turn off on my harddrive, but nothing else (my two burners, and ZIP drive). I messed around with the jumpers on them, switching them from Cable Select to Master (DVD-RW/Harddrive) and Slave (CD-RW/ZIP) respectively. Now the buffer stays constant, and the Device Manager says that UDMA is on for everything, but the Nero logs say that the harddrive's on PIO again and the burn still stops at 76% again, always with "error reading data".

3. In the speed tests, the read speed drops like a rock, and keeps on falling, but gets slower the lower it goes. For example, a speed test at 16x drops the read speed to 8x and lower, whereas a "write" speed of 2.4x will keep it near 12x read speed. The error? "Could only write at ___ speed, because the source data is too slow."

I also completely uninstalled Alcohol, and Nero, and used the Nero Clean tool (which, incidentally, is going to require me to reinstall iTunes, because it deleted the registry data for importing songs!). I reinstalled Nero, then used the InCD remove tool, then tried again. SAME RESULTS.

I'll post my most recent Nero log in the next post, since you guys will probably want it. I am very frustrated, and am about to give up...


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