Extremely slow DVD burn :( 10+ hours

[Kurtiskain]

Hi there

Here are my specs:
ASUS P4PE Motherboard
768MB DDR 266 RAM (3x 256MB 266)
Intel Celeron 2.5Ghz Cpu
4 Hdd's;
3x40 gb's at IDE 0 primary and slave and IDE 1 Primary
1x20Gb at onboard sata/ide controller
Lite-On DVD+/-R/RW 20x LH-0A1P (I think)

Anyway here is my problem:
lately I have had exremely slow dvd burns and I mean SLOW
I am using ConvertXtoDVD and yes its fully paid for no piracy issues!
As of lately I had to reinstall Windows XP due to the machine not letting me login fully and not going past the loading personal setings phase.
After this I have installed all chipset and gfx, sound drivers ect...
after a few days I wanted to continue burning my school project onto DVD's and so reinstalled ConvX2DVD
suprise suprise the pre-converted files took almost 13 hours to burn! (4.16GB project)
During the burn I noticed it notes burning in PIO mode and so I took the steps to fix that, whice were to uninstall Intell Application Accelerator and uninstall primary and secondary IDE Channels and now the DVD drive sits ad UDMA 4 and the HDD's at UDMA5

I am retrying the burn and at this point it still takes 3 minutes to do .5% and by my calculations 1% is approx 6 mins so whole burn is about 6x100%=600 minutes = 10 hours!
I noted that this time it stated UDMA mode 4 in the log but still takes ages....

another thing to note is the light on the front of the burner doesn't flash at a constant rate like it used to but rather flashes at random every half secnd or so like rapid hunfire (sorry for description but best thing I could think of)

After this burn completes I will post the Log

Any ideas are appreciated!! 

Kurtis

[Carbon Dudeoxide]

Any ideas are appreciated!!

Ideas, eh?

It could be:
CD Driver Issues
Background Processes taking up all the CPU power
Bad file

CD Driver Issues
Make sure the driver is the most recent one. I would reinstall it.

Background Processes taking up all the CPU power
Anything seem like this in Task Manager (High Memory Usage or CPU %age)

Bad file
Converted file not converted properly or converted with problems.

[Kurtiskain]

Well, solutions would be nice too

No drivers are installed for the DVD burner only windows standard and I did reinstall those.

Checked background processes...See atached

Bad file, just ported the VIDEO_TS Folder over to my work laptop (naughty I know)
and DVD burnt in under 15 mins

Now I realise I could just do all my copies with the laptop but I still want to fix this problem

Burn is at 7.1% on Desktop computer...started at 1:24 and the time is now 2:11

[recovering disk space -- attachment deleted by admin]

[Carbon Dudeoxide]

Try this.

Go to Start --> Run --> msconfig and press Enter.
Head over to the Startup Tab and uncheck as much as you can.
(note: if you uncheck something like a program, you can still use it without having to check it again but don't uncheck antivirus software.)

Restart the computer but don't do anything but burn the DVD.
Any improvement?

[Kurtiskain]

OK I canceled the burn and did what you asked, tried again...no effect still just as slow

Could a faulty IDE cable be the culprit here?

[Carbon Dudeoxide]

It could be. Is it possible you can try to burn something smaller?

Are there any more burning modes available?

[Kurtiskain]

A CD-R burned in under 10 mins (convert MP3 and burn) fast and easy...

Tried Nero burning the DVD...same effect

I forgot to mention during the school term that the dvd's burnt fine, e.g 15 mins got the whole project

[Carbon Dudeoxide]

Hmmm.... It could be a problem with the burner, i'm not sure.

Not the DVD itself, right?

[Kurtiskain]

I hope not it is still under warranty it was bought around this time last year 2 year warranty

So are there any thought on the fact that generally during burning (I noticed this with the CD-R that it flashes solidly on and off every second, but when burning the dvd is still flashes at the same time, but its like a strobe light when it's doing it


BTW i found out it is a Lite-On LH-20A1P (I was close )
I'm thinking of doing a Hard drive test in Sandra to see if it is the HDD not supplying it fast enough

[Kurtiskain]

I did some poking around in CXtDVD
and came up with this...Report Log
As you can see the first burns I did with it were straight PIO :S

[recovering disk space -- attachment deleted by admin]

[Carbon Dudeoxide]

Can you change the burning mode?

[Kurtiskain]

Burn mode? I assume you mean back to PIO or something?

[Carbon Dudeoxide]

To whatever 

What are there?

[Kurtiskain]

uhm..under dev manager there's UDMA if available and PIO

In ConvX there isnt any option but packet writing modes (SAO)

[Carbon Dudeoxide]

Are all of the modes slow?