Friend's Cd Burner not working "Buffer Underrun Error"

[ArmchairAthlete]

A friend of mine forgot his password for these forums and he can't post. He tried to retrieve it by having his account info sent to the email address he signed up for but didn't get a message. Anyhow I'm posting his description of his problem to try to help him fix it.

I have TDK 'velocd' internal ATAPI/E-IDE CD-RW Drive (Writes 12x, RE-Writes 10x, Reads 32x, Rips 32x) with "JustLink" software that supposedly avoids underrun errors.. Recently I have been getting the same error every time I am trying to burn ANYTHING, be it mp3's or ISO files.

The error occours usually about 3/4 of the way into the burn, a window comes up saying A buffer underrun error has occoured but its OK to continue because this program JustLink prevents such things from doing any harm. However, immidatly after I click OK to close this window a new window appears saying: "BURN PROCESS FAILED at 12x"

The software I am currently using is Nero 5.0.4.0 TDK, up to this point I have had no trouble at all with Nero but I decided to try BlindWrite v4.0. It also failed to complete the CD with a similar error. What could be the problem here?

He's usin Win2k Pro on an old 500Mhz Dell. He also tells me this problem just recently popped up, and that his CD burner was working fine yesterday.

Any ideas?


I can ask him for more info, this might not be enough but it is all I have right now.

 

[Sephiroth]

How much ram does he have?

You say it's an old 500mhz Dell but you don't mention what processor (Celeron, PII, PIII, etc).

Also, can you say if he has any programs running when he is burning?

 

[ArmchairAthlete]

It's a PIII 500Mhz. 384MB ram.

I'll ask him to try closing all programs next time to be sure, thx.


EDIT: Ok he's tried rebooting and burning with no programs running, same thing.

 

[mechBgon]

Check to ensure that the drive is still running in DMA mode, and also try some media that he knows it likes. Try a lower burn speed too.

There's a sticky thread in General Hardware saying that the AnandTech email system is down, so that could be why your friend isn't getting a reply right now. Have him try again in a few days maybe

 

[ArmchairAthlete]

Ok he checked, it is Ultra DMA transfer mode.

If he hasn't fixed it somehow by tomorrow I will go to his house and try the drive in my PC. If it can't burn right in my PC too the drive must have gone bad.

 

[Slammy1]

Hmmm, it could be a bad file also. If his drive supports under-run protection it should check by default. I've had this on burns before, and it comes back to a bad file evertime. You can also try to reinstall the software, but it quitting at the same point each time is indicative of a file problem usually.

 

[Zepper]

Running out of hard drive space for temp files can cause that too.
.bh.
:moon:

 

[ArmchairAthlete]

Hmmm. He says he lowered the speed to 4x and tried yet again. This time he says he burned a full music CD and it worked. Maybe he had some bad cds that wouldn't burn right, I'll post more updates I suppose.

 

[amdskip]

Bad cds are very possible. Tell him to get some Fuji's (Made in Japan is the important part).

 

[MrColin]

If I'm not mistaken a buffer underrun error occurs when the burner runs out of data to write to the cd because the system wasn't able to keep up with the write speed of the drive. Therefore, running it at lower speeds, or upgrading everything but the burner would be the best solutions. If it used to work at 16x and now it doesn't there may be something slowing down the system in the background.

But then agian wtf do I know...

Does win2k let you use restore points? If so try restoring to before the prob occured.

 

[NeoV]

this might sound silly, but I had the same problems, and it turns out the problem was that I installed that ESPN "motion" stuff - this apparently uses the same buffer process as burning a CD does, and can cause problems if you are burning a CD while that thing is loading video clips...might not be the problem here, I just thought I would mention it.