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Hi all, I've got a problem with my custom build PC. I have a Samsung SATA DVD burner drive with lightscribe, it's my first optical drive using SATA (in the past, all my optical drives connected over IDE) and I have a somewhat frustrating problem. All discs I use read absolutely fine, though I have noticed that they don't really seem to spin up that much, most other drives I've used tend to spin up a disc when first reading it and slowing down after a few seconds. When it comes to burning, this is my problem, I have had several successful disc burns at 4x speed (DVD's - single layer) but anything above that, Nero will report a failure. Not all burns at 4x are successful (just to note) but this is the most reliable speed setting. All CD's I've tried to burn have also failed (and the lowest speed setting I can select for a CD is 12x or 8x - I can't remember specifically) so I tend to do most of my burning on my laptop. When using a RW form of media (CD & DVD-RW) there are no speed settings, the only available option is 10x and always succeeds for some reason. I understand that burning at high speeds is not most reliable but with reading speeds not being their highest & speed options not being available for Re-Writeable discs, I'm sure there's some form of configuration problem.
My initial thoughts were that the disc drive itself was faulty, so to check this I plugged it into another computer/motherboard and did a full speed DVD burn (16x) with the same discs I was using before, and the burn was successful - I also tested the disc and it worked fine. I then tried to do research on Google as to what the cause of the problem could be, a common solution I found was enabling DMA, though these solutions were in response to a similar issue on IDE drives. According to Device Manager, DMA is enabled on my drive, but Nero logs state that DMA is off, this confused me somewhat. I also looked for DMA settings in the BIOS, however no SATA-specific DMA settings could be found (There were IDE DMA options but I have no IDE devices.) I've also updated the Nvidia SATA controllers in Device Manager, this did not fix the issue.
I don't know what else I can try with this issue, hence why I decided to finally join a forum and ask for help. Should it be necessary, here are my system specs:
Vista 64-bit
XFX 780i Motherboard
Intel Core2Duo E8400
4GB RAM
Nvidia (XFX) GTS 250 1GB
2 Samsung 1TB HDD's
Samsung DVD-RW with Lightscribe
Nero 9
Attached are 2 log files from Nero, one is from a successful burn and another from a failed burn.
Any help anyone can give will be appreciated, thanks in advance
My initial thoughts were that the disc drive itself was faulty, so to check this I plugged it into another computer/motherboard and did a full speed DVD burn (16x) with the same discs I was using before, and the burn was successful - I also tested the disc and it worked fine. I then tried to do research on Google as to what the cause of the problem could be, a common solution I found was enabling DMA, though these solutions were in response to a similar issue on IDE drives. According to Device Manager, DMA is enabled on my drive, but Nero logs state that DMA is off, this confused me somewhat. I also looked for DMA settings in the BIOS, however no SATA-specific DMA settings could be found (There were IDE DMA options but I have no IDE devices.) I've also updated the Nvidia SATA controllers in Device Manager, this did not fix the issue.
I don't know what else I can try with this issue, hence why I decided to finally join a forum and ask for help. Should it be necessary, here are my system specs:
Vista 64-bit
XFX 780i Motherboard
Intel Core2Duo E8400
4GB RAM
Nvidia (XFX) GTS 250 1GB
2 Samsung 1TB HDD's
Samsung DVD-RW with Lightscribe
Nero 9
Attached are 2 log files from Nero, one is from a successful burn and another from a failed burn.
Any help anyone can give will be appreciated, thanks in advance