Strange problem with new P4 setup and DVD burner

MCS

Platinum Member
Feb 3, 2000
2,519
0
76
Hi there (wow haven't posted on here for ages!)

I have just replaced my Athlon XP setup (board, chip, mem), and purchased some new SATA drives, and my system is now the following

P4 3.0Ghz 800FSB
Abit IC7-MAX3
1024MB PC3200 RAM
2x120GB Maxtor SATA drives in RAID0 ----------------------------- > On-chip SATA controller
160GB Maxtor IDE drive & 60GB Maxtor IDE --------------------- > PCI Promise Ultra100 controller
Liteon DVD-ROM, DVD+-RW & CD-RW ------------------------------ > Onboard IDE controller

The other SATA controller is Disabled in the BIOS.

The problem is, when I burn an ISO image from any of the hard drives to a DVD-R, the disc effectively comes out "blank" or garbage data. I have tried Nero 5.5, 6, Stomp, etc, all the same results. These are DVD-Rs I know work fine, and ISO images I know burn and play fine, as I had done so on the Athlon XP setup. Another thing to note, when I do a read speed test just before burn, the speed seems to settle down to just 3X, **for any of the drives**. However, if I do an independent test under the Cache option of Nero, its more like 150X for the RAID drives and 90X for the IDEs. Sandra reports a very healthy score for the RAID drives in its test also.

I am running Windows XP + SP1, and have got all the latest BIOSes. drivers etc for the various controller chips. I have tried removing the Promise card and just using the 2 RAID'd drives, makes no difference.

Where am I going wrong?

Thanks!
 

MustISO

Lifer
Oct 9, 1999
11,927
12
81
What's the setting on the controller that the DVD-R is on? Is it set to PIO or DMA? It really should burn fine either way but you may want to try to enable DMA. Another test would be to make an image of a single layer DVD (<4.37GB) using DVDDecrypter and then burn with DVDDecrypter, see if that works.
 

MCS

Platinum Member
Feb 3, 2000
2,519
0
76
The 3 optical drives are on the normal IDE ports, and according to Device manager they are all set to Ultra DMA 2...