LIGHTNING UK!

I don't much like the samsung drives to be honest. Liteon are ok, as are the ones corny mentioned. BenQ and LiteOn are good for scanning discs with using DVDInfoPro / CDSpeed (both free). Plextor drives can do loads of scanning with Plextor's own 'PlexTools' program. LG drives are ok but the bitsetting stuff is annoying because it doesn't remember your settings - unlike all the other drives. (Samsung are actually worse in this department).

Shame you can't download it from there yet! (I have a 1655 too )

Outpost Firewall was ok (from what I remember). Sygate Firewall Pro was too but I think it may have been taken over by symantec now. I tried out quite a few different ones a couple of years back and nothing really came close to ZA. Why do you bother with the antispyware stuff in ZA? Just get / use the basic firewall package, then you won't have the problem! There are a zillion other tools out there for spyware and unless you're stupid (I know you're not!) you shouldn't get any anyway. Normal AV programs pick up most stuff that IE fails to block or at least prompt you on (or at least my one does).

CD Speeds DB, CD Speeds! DVD gets up to about 22mb/s anyway and you're only on 29mb/s You can show off about transfer rates when you can match Corny's ones at 80 - 90mb/s.

The first one is supposed to come up! If you don't click ok it cancels the build. The 2nd is (I guess) because it's not supported by wine.

Yeah they'll probably replace it with the same drive. Assuming that it is free, it's certainly worth a shot - even if it still doesn't work! After that, you can buy any drive you like. They're pretty much all available for ?30 - ?40 so they're not stupidly expensive anymore(compared to the ?200 odd we were paying a few years ago!). Did you try burning at 8x, 12x, 16x btw?

If it burns and then fails verify, it means it 'might' work in some drives. The drive that just burnt it couldn't read it back so it's really not a good sign. OEM drives are never supported very well. As you say, this might be a good time to buy a new drive that DOES have firmware updates.

1. Already in there, has been for ages. 2. It's a hardware thing.

If your hdd can't even sustain 4x write speed, something is definitely wrong. Check for cable sharing as mentioned by Shamus (get hdd + burner on different IDE channels) and use the 80 wire IDE cable. Then follow the DMA stuff / post in the FAQ. Once you've deleted + reinstalled the IDE controller, the hdd should probably register as UDMA 5 or 6 and the burner as UDMA 2 or 4.

You are correct A_T. The files are written directly to the disc without any intermediate ISO file.

All the same options are still there, just you can choose if you want to see the 'yes / no' box and also you can select if it auto-replies with a 'yes' or a 'no' depending on how you like to work.

Basically it wrote to it ok but then can't read it back. So it's either dirt / a scratch or the drive it just producing bad burns on that media (or rather that dye type). Go to the website for whoever made your PC and see if there is a firmware update available for the drive. If there is, update it. They often fix issues burning certain media. After that, get some different discs. Verbatim ones using the MCC dye or Taiyo Yuden ones recommended.

Don't just go by the brand name, you need to find an online shop that tells you the dye the discs use. It's the dye that's important. The same brand name can use several different dye types - which could be a reason why TDK worked ok once and then not again.

That really depends on if you burnt anything with DVD Decrypter. If you didn't, ImgBurn won't help much as that's all it does! DVDShrink can't do double layer images properly - unless using the Nero burn engine maybe, I dunno. So in that sense you're better off using ImgBurn for the burn part.

Hmm why isn't the device buffer registering any value? Is that normal?

Basically, the drive failed to finish off (finalise, or thereabouts) the disc. Are you getting this on every burn you do or just one (Did you try more than 1?) You'd do well to ditch the CMC MAG discs and use some decent Verbatim MCC dye or Taiyo Yuden ones.

The physical location of the layer break shouldn't be an issue. To the drive, it's just a number. It doesn't care about the data content. This issue really shouldn't be anything software related, the drive controls the burn, not the software. A lot of people have done DL burns with BenQ drives and I don't recall seeing results anything like as bad as yours. I hate to say it but maybe something has just given up the ghost here. If you want me to burn a DL on my BenQ 1640 I will do. I'm pretty confident it'll come out perfectly fine though.

Yup that's fine. EDIT: hang on, only your D: is not NTFS therefore if you don't use D:, you don't need to do anything.

That's what you've called your drive. If you type 'label' from that same command prompt window it should tell you what it is. i.e. label d: You should then see something like: C:\Documents and Settings\[username]>label d: Volume in drive D: has no label Volume Serial Number is 1234-5678 Volume label (32 characters, ENTER for none)? You can press CTRL+C to abort changing the label. Just remember what it says in the first line - you can see mine has no label. You need to enter that in the convert process. It's a kinda double check / fail safe prompt so you don't convert the wrong drive accidentally

Nero always says it's burning at the speed you selected, it doesn't mean it really is. Do you have a log handy? an IBG file? If you can provide those, maybe I can find the root cause. If you set the program to write a 'max', there is no scope for the program / drive to get muddled up. 'Max' is not a number as such, it's just sending 0xFFFFFFFF to the drive for the speed. After that, the speed is totally down to the drive. If it was burning at 4x when you selected 8x I'd say the drive is using the next lowest number - so selecting 10x, 12x etc might make it burn at 8x. This cannot possibly be the case with 'Max'.

If yours is a Dell machine, get the E113 version from here http://forum.rpc1.org/dl_firmware.php?download_id=2279 Also, slowing decent media down to 4x doesn't mean you'll always get the best burn. They may do more work with higher speeds so be sure to try those too.

So you need to use custom and put sectors to load at 4. The boot bit on windows cd's is 2k so it's actually a common size.

rcubed, Are you clicking on the little picture of the camera (actually on the DIP screen) when you take a screenshot?! There's no way those pictures are true png images, it's all blurry around the text and the graphs look blurry too. That 2nd jpeg turned png of yours is over 400k but as a png it's about 90k! (See attached - and notice how much clearer it looks) As you say, the IBG doesn't show anything too weird, not even when sampled. I'm at a loss, sorry. The numbers all add up but it just doesn't make any sense!

Do you ever see the 'Waiting for buffers to recover' message in your log? If not, these won't do anything - and you don't really want them to cut in early. Just make your main buffer bigger if your machine has trouble filling it all the time. Basically though, it's when the main buffer falls below the set level and the device one does too (it has to do this a few times in a row - sampled every 250ms I believe), the program pauses until the main one is full again. It will also wait for disc activitiy to go below the said threshold. You can view this stuff in perfmon.msc

The program isn't going to change what it does on a per instance basis, the lines a hardcoded to send the speed to your drive depending on what you select for the speed. I've never actually heard of that media brand, maybe it's a cheapo one that your drive doesn't fully support. The drive could be slowing the burn down because it knows it won't get a good burn if it burns at full speed.