CDRW problem that has me befuddled

[mbpark]

Heya,

I have a similar setup I bought my sister (Athlon XP 1700+, same motherboard with extra RAID controllers, 384MB RAM, 120GB HD, 16X DVD-ROM), but with Windows XP Professional.

I went on eBay and got her a cheap 4X SCSI burner and PCI SCSI card. $40. I am going to drop a Plextor in there later this year.

Never once have made a coaster, and the burn-in test was playing a DVD while running Norton Anti-Virus 2002 and copying 1GB of files, while burning the CD using Roxio Easy CD Creator.

I like that motherboard. It's the best one ASUS made for the Athlon, IMHO, because it's the most stable. Don't get me started on the original nForce mobos .

Mitch

[Bitman]

Originally posted by vsp
I burned a ~680MB CD at 48x in 4:25 and at 32x in 4:30. ... Both the read buffer and the recorder buffer level were jumping around like mad during the burning, but buffer underrun protection was on, so the end product was fine.

That's about what 24x takes, so you're still b0rked. I'd recommed burning at 16x (about 5:00, you should get few to zero BURP hits) until you get things straightened out.

[vsp]

Originally posted by Bitman
That's about what 24x takes, so you're still b0rked. I'd recommed burning at 16x (about 5:00, you should get few to zero BURP hits) until you get things straightened out.

Now all I have to do is figure out what else can be straightened out. If the IDE cabling is correct (which it seems to be now), and the system has enough horsepower (which as an Athlon 1300 w/256MB RAM and a couple of free HD gigs, it certainly does)...

(Hypothesis one: I need a faster hard drive, or possibly just a new drive on which I can put a fresh install of Windows. I'm eyeing one of those 7200 RPM, 8MB Cache drives and trying to justify the cost to myself. Not easy, when I have a week at the shore coming up, and August and early September are LOADED with PS2 games that are must-buys (Silent Hill 3, VF4: Evolution, Hunter: The Reckoning Wayward, Soul Calibur II, Fatal Frame 2, Monster Rancher 4).

[Bitman]

Originally posted by vsp
August and early September are LOADED with PS2 games that are must-buys

There's your solution, then. Sell the PC, and play PS/2 games for a year. When you're tired of that, buy a new machine, and everything on it will be working fine! :p

I'm still wedged on the theory that your UDMA is turned off, and the drivers are broken so as to hide the option from you. I might be way off (as so often happens when I'm wedged) but if it were my machine, I'd tear it apart until I knew what happened to the UDMA options. The symptoms are consistent with UDMA being disabled -- high CPU use, but limited speed. If the HD was too slow, your CPU use would be low, even as the burn job failed.