Do I need to RMA this motherboard?

[DaveLazell]

Hello everyone,

I have been building systems for a while now and recently built one for a friend of mine. I brought it over to his house and set it up. He tried to burn a DVD and Nero would sit at 1% forever. The system consists of the following: Biostar Tforce 965pt MB, 1Gb Crucial PC5300 RAM, 250Gb WD HDD, Xclio Goodpower 500W PSU, Pentium D 805 CPU, DVD burner (cant recall the brand). The system is running Windows XP with all updates, newest bios, drivers from biostars website (included software was crap).
I have eliminated heat as an issue (made sure everything was cool and still same problems). Also I have replaced the cable, still no good. DMA mode is also confirmed. I put my Plexor burner in his system and nero seemed to burn it OK (after a delay), but upon scanning the DVD the error rates were VERY bad. Either drive seems to read without errors, although sometimes it is really slow and I have to cancel and restart the copy process to get it to go at full speed. I am at a loss as to what it could be other than the motherboard... Is there anything else I can try or should I RMA the board?

Thanks,
Dave.

EDIT: forgot to mention that the system is not overclocked.. its still running at 133 MHz bus speed (for now), 1:1 memory (auto:4,4,4,12)

 

[Bremen]

Did you consider the discs you're using might be bad?

 

[Captante]

As suggested, you need to try different media before anything else... I've had the best luck with Verbatim & TDK +R's in particular... if that turns out not to be the problem I'd suggest checking out the RAM next before RMA'ing the motherboard.

 

[DaveLazell]

The disks were Ricoh 16x that he was using, I had though of that, although I will try some of my Taiyo Yuden disks and see if anything changes. As for RAM I did try running Orthos and it ran for 30 min without problems (making sure cpu wasnt overheating-- that cpu heats the whole room lol). Also more importantly, I tried the OCZ memtest86 for 3 runs and there were no errors. Any other suggestions? I will be going over there after work tomorrow. Thanks

 

[erickj92]

It could be nero or the dvd rom drive, take the disks to your computer and try to burn one with the same media

 

[postaled]

Seems to not be a mobo problem... I agree with what people are saying with test the media etc, make sure you narrow down the problem before RMA'ing because you don't want to recieve the new board and realize "oh no, that wasn't the problem..."

 

[Captante]

Another possibility is a software conflict ... if he has any virtual-drive or stand-alone decrypting software installed its possible its causing the errors... for example when I used to want to use DVD X-Copy I had to un-install the Pinnacle DVD burning software I had been using to get error-free copies. Another thing you should check out is wether there are any firmware updates for his DVD burner available.

 

[DaveLazell]

Ok I tried Taiyo Yuden media, the burner still hangs up at the lead-in. Also his media works fine in my computer. I also tried uninstalling nero, removing cd-rom drivers, reinstalling drivers from VIA's website, reinstalling nero, same result.. I am going to RMA the board tomorrow if I cant fix it by then. Thanks for everyones input.

 

[DaveLazell]

Update: The new motherboard has the same problem. Apparently this board has problems with writing to optical drives in PATA mode. Solution: I ordered a SATA writer and bingo, worked!

 

[Lazlo Panaflex]

Yeah, the problem is the VIA IDE driver...it's a POS (I ran into the same issue a while back.) Uninstall it, and use the Windows default driver. Fixed it for me....

 

[sjandrewbsme]

Originally posted by: oldhoss
Yeah, the problem is the VIA IDE driver...it's a POS (I ran into the same issue a while back.) Uninstall it, and use the Windows default driver. Fixed it for me....

Similar reasons lead me to stop buying VIA chipsets several years back. I've always had back luck with them.