hi, ive been copying some dvds containing data and everything was going fine. then last night when i manually copied the dada from a dvd to the hdd, and then tried to burn the disk - it suddenly decided to take over an hour to burn,since then it continues to do so. It warns it can bun at 8x instead of 16x due to disk (which is ok seeing as i belive this is the speed it was using previously - i know for sure it used to take 8mins to burn a full 4gb dvd). i have tried simulation mode in nero which it appears to take the same ammount of time. i also gave alcohol a go and it appears to do the same. so i tried doing a copy of a dvd i did the other night when it took the 8mins to burn n however long it takes to image the disk; it is takeing forever to copy the disk, and an hour to burn. whats going on? i havent changed any settings (a week ago i did alter jumper settings due to a delayed write failue on the ide drive on the same ide cable but it was burning fine and normal upuntill the other night). Set up: on the only ide avaiable - dvd drive, ide drive, both set to cable select and i belive the hdd is on the first plug on the ide and the dvd is on the second. please help as i need to continue backing up my data. Chez

Check the properties of the IDE controller in Device manager. The drives should be running in one of the DMA modes. Expand IDE contoller> right click on one of drives in question> choose properties> advanced. Post back what you see.

thanks when i open up ide ata/atapi controllers i have the following listed (is this right it seems a bit odd): intel ich8 2 port serial ata storage cont... intel ich8 4 port serial ata storage cont... primary ide channel primary ide channel primary ide channel Secondary IDE channel Secondary IDE channel Secondary IDE channel standard dual channel pci ide controller The only ones which i can choose advanced properties are the primary and secondary ide ones (as expected) for each however there appear to have different settings (ive labelled them 1,2,3 to help). primary ide channel 1 has: device 0: type: auto detect transfer mode: dma if available current transfer mode: not applicable device 1: auto detection dma if available not applicable primary ide channel 2 has: device 0: type: auto detect transfer mode: dma if available ultra dma mode 5 <---different device 1: auto detection dma if available not applicable primary ide channel 3 has: device 0: type: auto detect transfer mode: dma if available current transfer mode: not applicable device 1: auto detection dma if available not applicable secondary ide channel 1: device 0: type: auto detect transfer mode: dma if available current transfer mode: not applicable device 1: auto detection dma if available not applicable secondary ide channel 2: device 0: type: auto detect transfer mode: dma if available current transfer mode: not applicable device 1: auto detection dma if available not applicable secondary ide channel 3: device 0: type: auto detect transfer mode: PIO only current transfer mode: PIO mode device 1: auto detection dma if available ultra DMA mode 6 hope this makes sense to you. the only thing i did last night was install the prey demo onto the ide drive as it has problems running off of sata drives. Chez

secondary ide channel 3: device 0: type: auto detect transfer mode: PIO only current transfer mode: PIO mode The above settings indicate whatever drive/s are running in PIO mode. That mode is really slow. All the other settings don't appear to have drives connected to them. I would suggest that you install/re-install Motherboard Chipset drivers. If the chipset drivers are installed and are in use the other problem may be an older style 40 wire IDE cable in use. You need an 80 wire cable to properly run an optical burner. 80 wire can be identified by the colors of the connectors. The end to the MBoard is colored blue/red/yellow, etc. The center connector is grey and the other end is black. You could also have a damaged cable.

thanks, any ideas why its just suddenly started happening? im checking and will reinstall my mobo drivers,. i had to buy a longer ide cable when i built this system due to the drive layout and i checked it is an 80way cable (newlink 90cm cable http://www.newlinkproducts.co.uk/pr... if all else fails i may have to change back to my older asus cable n have to have my dvd drive at the bottom of the case again. im not convinced this is the problem due to the problem occurring months after this cable was installed. any other ideas while i chech if driver updates fix the problem. p.s. sorry for the late reply i was at work. Chez

Tried to update my drivers, but i never get past the standard finished wizard confirmation. every chipset update ive done has sections after this, and finally a request to restart the pc none of these occured, so im inclined to believe the update didnt ocure. you mentioning the pio thing above got me thinking about forcing it to try ultra dma mode 2 again - but due to windows being itself it involved some reg hacking to make it retest the drives capabilities. testing a copy of dvd now and hopefully its going well. now if something triggered windows to change the transfer mode to pio only then it would explain why it appeared to do it all of a sudden, without any obvious input form myself. i remember having a problem copying a dvd and maybe it failing to read the dvd several times (and thus failing to create an image) could have triggered the pio issue. however i am unsure if the copy problem occurred before or after the slow speed. i just hope if it is fixed that it does not end up forcing a recurrence of the jraid (9), cdrom (15) and disk(51) errors and thus lockups. anyways im clouding the issue. will let you know how the burn turns out. Chez

Burn took just under 8 mins!!! Thanks so much OtheHill! your a life saver. Lets just hope it doesn't bring back my other problems. so in recap the ide device was forced into only using PIO mode via windows xp. Googeling i found a guide which explained how to modify the reg to force xp to re detect the mode that the drive is capable of. http://users.bigpond.net.au/ninjadu... (i had to find the right ide listing (0008 was mine - u find it by finding which one has the values listed in that section)). there shouldn't be any need to do the create key section due to ms's fix in SP1. a reboot and it lists its using ultra dma mode 2. thankyou again! Chez