Ichinichi Posted February 10, 2009 Share Posted February 10, 2009 Argh! Its happening again! Semaphore timeout, then retry fails. Please help. Disks: Verbatim DVD+R DL 2.4X from Best Buy store Origin: Singapore Drive: Sony DRX-840U History: I purchased this drive and these disks in October 2008. Successfully burned 5 DL and several Audio CDs and Data DVDs since then. All DL disks are from the same spindle as the other five. Last successful burn was data DVD. I have not installed anything since my last successful DL burn. Log: I 19:53:46 ImgBurn Version 2.4.2.0 started! I 19:53:46 Microsoft Windows XP Professional (5.1, Build 2600 : Service Pack 3) I 19:53:46 Total Physical Memory: 2,096,364 KB - Available: 1,704,456 KB I 19:53:46 Initialising SPTI... I 19:53:47 Searching for SCSI / ATAPI devices... I 19:53:47 Found 1 DVD Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mmalves Posted February 10, 2009 Share Posted February 10, 2009 There's nothing much you can do. Make sure you have the latest drivers for your motherboard's chipset. Search the forum for "semaphore timeout" and you'll see other suggestions that may or may not work Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ichinichi Posted February 10, 2009 Author Share Posted February 10, 2009 There's nothing much you can do. Make sure you have the latest drivers for your motherboard's chipset. Search the forum for "semaphore timeout" and you'll see other suggestions that may or may not work for serious? you mean there isn't an understood cause? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ichinichi Posted February 10, 2009 Author Share Posted February 10, 2009 There's nothing much you can do. Make sure you have the latest drivers for your motherboard's chipset. Search the forum for "semaphore timeout" and you'll see other suggestions that may or may not work Well, the thing is, nothing has changed in my system since the last successful DL write. Its the same install of Windows, the same sticks of RAM, the same spindle of disks, the same drivers, same motherboard, same everything. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mmalves Posted February 10, 2009 Share Posted February 10, 2009 No one knows for sure the root cause of this problem so all you can do is try some workarounds to get it working again. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ichinichi Posted February 10, 2009 Author Share Posted February 10, 2009 (edited) Where are the error descriptions generated from? Internal to IMGBURN or is "Semaphore timeout" just passed through IMGBURN from the OS? Semaphore timeout means that the OS has detected a starvation/deadlock scenario on some shared resource. It cannot be the file itself, since IMGBURN is just reading it, and no one ought to be writing to the image at the same time as it is being burned anyway, so there's no risk of Read-After-Write. Meaning that the resource must be the burner itself; Windows is detecting that at least one other some other process is reserving the drive and has determined that a deadlock has occured. This then kills all processes and resets the semaphore values. Edited February 10, 2009 by Ichinichi Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LIGHTNING UK! Posted February 10, 2009 Share Posted February 10, 2009 It's an OS generated error code. If you look at these you'll notice there's dead on 10 seconds between them. W 20:08:30 Failed to Write Sectors 1305792 - 1305823 - Reason: The semaphore timeout period has expired.W 20:08:30 Retrying (1 of 20)... W 20:08:40 Retry Failed - Reason: The semaphore timeout period has expired. W 20:08:40 Retrying (2 of 20)... So your system is timing out the I/O after only 10 seconds and totally ignoring that I've set a much longer timeout on all the commands. I have no idea exactly which driver is responsible for doing that, sorry. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ichinichi Posted February 12, 2009 Author Share Posted February 12, 2009 It's an OS generated error code. If you look at these you'll notice there's dead on 10 seconds between them. W 20:08:30 Failed to Write Sectors 1305792 - 1305823 - Reason: The semaphore timeout period has expired.W 20:08:30 Retrying (1 of 20)... W 20:08:40 Retry Failed - Reason: The semaphore timeout period has expired. W 20:08:40 Retrying (2 of 20)... So your system is timing out the I/O after only 10 seconds and totally ignoring that I've set a much longer timeout on all the commands. I have no idea exactly which driver is responsible for doing that, sorry. This is why I love imgburn; where the hell else will the creator still actively participate at this level? lightning uk, I will take a look at my registry entries, perhaps i've set them in the past (although i do not recall doing so between october and now)... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ichinichi Posted February 14, 2009 Author Share Posted February 14, 2009 Just a quick update of a solution of sorts. I reinstalled Windows. No problem now. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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