Nero burning VERY slowly on good media.

[sharkytm]

Well, I built my company a new sidescan sonar computer, with a HighPoint RAID 133 card to control a pair of 160GB Seagate 7200.8 drives. All was well, until recently. I received a complaint that the dvd burner was taking forever to burn a DVD. Then, all of a sudden, Nero Express, which had been working perfectly, refused to launch. The Nero SmartStart would launch, you'd click "nero express", and it'd hang, locking the CD tray, and MS Explorer.
Ok, the dvd drive took a dump, fine.
I bought a new NEC Optiarc AD7170A, and installed it. Nero still acted funny, so i did a reinstall of Nero. Now it runs like its supposed to, but the DVD burning is horrendously slow. Like, burning a 3GB fileset takes 40 minutes. I at first suspected the DMA settings, but they are all on DMA mode. I'm using 80-conductor cables all around. I just uninstalled and reinstalled all the IDE channels/controllers, and the HPT raid drivers.

Now, what could be the problem?

[Chewy]

welcome to the forum


http://winhlp.com/WxDMA.htm
humor me and run this quick fix

in blank media and burning forum there's a sticky on post a nero log

either dma or real funky non-standard ide drivers, if that's the case roll back to windows default

[sharkytm]

Thanks. I'll run it. I've been lurking here and on CDFreaks for a long long time, but this problem has me stumped. I'll run that VB script, and report back. The SS machine isnt internet enabled, as it sits on our boat most of the time.

[sharkytm]

Here are the logs:
infotool.txt, which is from after I ran that VB Script.

[Chewy]

that's an nero info tool report, not a burn log

but dma is off and windows 2000 should be upgraded to sp4

[sharkytm]

You are right, I'm amazed that DMA is off, I just renabled it, and now its off. Maybe its encountering errors.

As for the SP4 upgrade, that may or may not be possible. I'll try turning DMA back on, and doing another burn, and posting that log.

[BR7]

This could be the problem right here
Description : Nero Burning ROM
Version : 6, 6, 1, 4

See if Chewy agrees, if he does have a look here (http://forum.digital-digest.com/showthread.php?t=62465) you may have to go back to Nero version 6.6.0.18

[Chewy]

the service pack 4 upgrade is mandatory, your os is so corrupt by now I wonder how anything works, much less dvd burning

http://www.microsoft.com/windows2000/downloads/servicepacks/sp4/default.mspx

[sharkytm]

My CD is Nero 6.6.0.19, I upgraded it to try and fix this.
I'm downloading the SP4 network (full) install now, I'll have to make a full backup of the machine first. The software that runs our sonar is very picky about what system it runs on. I don't understand why things would have changed so drastically basically overnight... nothing was changed, and all of a sudden, DVD burning grinds to a halt.

Anyhow,
Burning now, its going to take a while. I also re-renabled DMA, and according to device manager, its still on.

I did a max speed test, and it said the max wasn't 16x, but 12x. I'm burning at 12x, and it doesn't seem to have helped.
I'll post the burn report and the infotool report once everything finishes.
Thanks to all for the help, I'm very good with hardware, but this problem isn't like anything else I've encountered.

[Chewy]

1. windows 2000 sp2 doesn't even support 128 gig hard drives, sp3 did
2. your ide/dma drivers with w2k are problematic at best
3. if you can't use XP then you should at least slipstream the admin install of
sp4 into the cab files for a clean install

[sharkytm]

Here's the burn log. From what I can make of it, the RAID array isn't running in DMA mode, which may be part of the problem.

Any thoughts on that?

[Chewy]

old roxio/easycd software drivers are nothing but trouble

sharing a cable between a hard drive and a dvd burner is not good

use nero to test the drive speeds

[sharkytm]

old roxio/easycd software drivers are nothing but trouble

sharing a cable between a hard drive and a dvd burner is not good

use nero to test the drive speeds
I'm not sharing any cables. The DVD-RW is on its own cable, on channel 2.
The boot drive is on channel 1.

I used Nero's drive speed test, and it reported 68,000kb/s for the RAID, 8,000kb/s for the boot drive (its an old old 8GB seagate).

How would I go about removing the old roxio drivers?

[sharkytm]

I just ran the Nero CD-DVD speed test on a data DVD.
CPU usage@1x=70%!
2x, 4x, and 8x: n/a
Reads barely broke 1.5x, most were around 1x.
Something is seriously wrong here.

[Chewy]

unless you are having a drastic power issue(maybe that old drive sharing a power lead) I can only guess that the driver(5.00.2195.2247) and your southbridge chipset aren't working right

Is it a sis chipset?

[sharkytm]

VIA chipset. I have no other devices plugged in other than 2 HDD's on my RAID, a single IDE drive, the NEC DVD-RW, and the mobo.

I just upgraded to SP4, no change. It still takes ~2 minutes for Nero Express to run when I click on something in StartSmart. :sigh:

Next, I'll uninstall NERO, do the clean install of nero 6.6.0.19. I have no idea what else to try other than a clean install of Win2K, which is a major undertaking.

[sharkytm]

Now that I've installed SP4, uninstalled Nero, done the clean-pack routine, and reinstalled, I can't even get Nero.exe to run. It shows up in task manager, and just sits there, never shows up onscreen.

[sharkytm]

No one else has a suggestion, I guess I'll take the primary hdd out and reinstall win2K SP4 on a spare drive... maybe that'll cure it.

[Chewy]

what motherboard is it?

[sharkytm]

what motherboard is it?
Not 100% sure. Its a VIA PIII board.

Our latest plan is to just flatten the machine and reinstall.