Burner trouble

[beachbumm33]

Not sure what happened but my hp 940i crossflashed to liteon lh-18a1h burner wont burn dvds anymore. It still reads them fine, actually its a great dvd reader, but when i try to burn with imgburn i get multiple rewrite tries then it just quits. Ive done a clean install of imgburn, reflashed the hlo7 firmware in safe mode, uninstalled, then reinstalled the drive, new cable, checked dma, and checked filter drivers. Just kind of at a loss....any further help and/or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

[Chewy]

and you are using premium blanks, not something that just happened to work before?

[beachbumm33]

the usual sony 1x-8x ty media....
so i tried a little tinkering, you know im good for that chewy, I upgraded the drive to a lh-20a1h with codeguys eeprom and flash utility. Tried an iso burn with imgburn, and it now works, although i used a mcc004 verbatim at 8x write speed. the burn was awful and never got above 6x....also, the device buffer and buffer for the drive were very erratic during the burn
was wondering if my cable is going bad? just not sure, because my 160p6s is still burning fine, no issues at all
think i'll go try a burn at 4x with the ty media

[Chewy]

I wonder if power is the issue? It reading good and the other drive burning fine would kind of rule out ide cable and system problems and lens being dirty?

The reflash would take care of firmware corruption?

Might try just hooking the drive to the shortest power connector all by itself?

Liteon's are not the most durable burners

[beachbumm33]

what do you mean by the shortest power connector Shewy?
maybe the reflash took care of the problem, not sure
i have 3 160p6s burners, and im still on the first one, over 600 burns so far, all very good quality, with an occasional coaster now and then, lol
Ill scan the 4x burn and post

[Chewy]

follow a power lead from the power supply, the one closest is the safest, having no other device hooked on that set of connections is also necessary

a good voltmeter is even better

like all manufacturers, liteon has had good batches and bad ones

[beachbumm33]

what voltage am i looking for Chewy, i have a good multi function meter

totally agree with the good batches and bad, this burner (originally branded hp) has done well too. Lots of burns, but mostly used as a reader. I think you might have even given me a hand crossflashing it almost a year ago, lol.....thanks for the help with all Chewy

[Chewy]

just set the voltmeter on the 12V DC scale

black is ground orange may be 12v yellow 5 volt

haven't done it in a long long time

measure while computer is running but never connect or disconnect any components while powered up

[beachbumm33]

ok, i understand ya....ill see whats up

burns looks good to me....maybe a random problem with the firmware or something, ill open up my machine and check out what you told me Chewy, gott run, thanks for the help.

[beachbumm33]

another problem.....wasnt quite sure what to do with the voltmeter, Chewy. Went away for the weekend, just got home, tried to burn an iso with imgburn @ 4x, device buffer jumping alllll over the place and the write speed wouldnt go above 1.8x. Tried it in my other burner, same thing. Uninstalled imgburn, rebooted, reinstalled, same thing. Ive checked the filter drivers, all good, uninstalled both drives, shut down pc. unplugged both drives, only plugged one drive back in. restarted machine and attempted to burn a different iso, same problem.....any suggestions?

[Chewy]

well dma going to pio usually kicks down to way below 2X burn speed

source files are heavily fragmented then your hard drive has to keep slowing down to find them and yo9ur buffers go crazy

read bad ide drivers can cause problems?

same with cruddy blanks or a bad burner

[Chewy]

with the side off and the computer running hook/stick the ground lead from multimeter in the black power connector, with scale on 12volt dc, then read voltage on the red and orange with the red/hot probe?

who knows maybe dust bunnies or sony rootkit clan having a party

[beachbumm33]

i have one burner plugged in, on the first available spot on the cable, when i check dma the first primary channel says dma 5, the second says transfer mode dma if available current transfer mode pio, that is under device 0, is that because nothing is plugged into the other place on the cable?
I defragged not that long ago, but was told not to defrag with large video files on the hdd

bad ide drivers? dont understand
good blanks, ty's......and its happening with both my burners

no dust bunnies, lol......machine has been cleaned with cc cleaner, spybot, norton, all those good things
what gets me is that i burned 3 movies b4 i left, and showed you one of the scans, then after being away, the problem reappeared.....
ill do the volt meter now

[Chewy]

when i check dma the first primary channel says dma 5, the second says transfer mode dma if available current transfer mode pio

hard drive is dma 5, burner is pio, fix it

[beachbumm33]

all good with the dma now, ill try a burn

here are some quotes from an article i read:

The most frequent use why a CD or DVD port falls back to PIO mode is a scratched or otherwise unreadable CD or DVD.

A not so rare hardware problem is a bad or too long IDE data cable. You need 80-way cables, not the older ones with only 40 wires. With poor cables the device may work, but Windows will probably step down to lower DMA speeds or even to PIO.

A further cause may be waking from standby mode, if one of the involved components does not perform this process correctly.

Other reasons can show up in the event log, so check this first and see if you can find repeated Atapi errors recorded. If so, you likely have a hardware defect. You can use the procedures described on this page, but your computer will probably fall back to PIO mode again and again, until you solve the underlying problem, which may be located inside the device, on the motherboard, or in the IDE data cable and its connectors.

very interesting read..... http://winhlp.com/node/10