Hi there

I was wondering if you might be able to help me at all. Basically I am having some problems with my Pioneer 104 dvdr and Im not too sure what to do. Since I bought it the dvd reader has always been a bit dodgy, but I thought that was because of poor dvd media. But now its getting a bit silly, there are DVDs I have that copy to hdd fine on my other pc with a DVD-ROM drive, but on the DVDr you can just hear the lazer struggling to read the dvd and then an error comes up.

Aswell as it not being able to read some dvds, I also have found that basically any DVD I copy at 2x doesnt work. I have copied 2x on 2 Verbatim dvds, and only one worked, and Ive now done 5 DVDs on the Datasafe Gen2 dvds and NONE of them work :( They just can't be read. I am worried that it might be something wrong with the DVD drive...do you think this could be the case. Someone mentioned upgrading the firmware (currently 1.20) but I'm not sure if this would help? Ive had this problem with both Win98 and WinXP. I hope you dont mind my asking for your help, but I know there are alot of experienced DVDr users in here and thought they might be able to help.

Its set as Slave with my CD-RW as Master, and DMA is turned on.

Id really appreciate any help at all.

Thanks again

Daniel

Are you burning on the fly or from hard drive images, hard drive images tend to be much more reliable for quality, and the reading part may just be the speed of the drive because the Pioneer doesn't have a great dvd read speed, most people just use a dvd-rom drive to read the dvd's and keep the writer to writing purposes only, if you want a good dvd drive check out the Liteon 16x and the slot loading Pioneer 16x.

Hey mate,

Im burning from the hard drive because the Pioneer is the only dvd drive I have. I would like to get a dvdrom drive, but I dont have any more IDE slots in my pc nor do I have any bays left. If there was a cdr writer with a DVD rom combo that was good I might get that...if it was good as a cdrom drive aswell.

But also why do you think Im having problems copying at 2x? I find it very strange :( Im using Win98 btw.

cheers
bb

Set it to master.

If that doesn't resolve it, disable UDMA. These are know problems with this drive, and Pioneer actually released advice on one of their sites to make sure it's set to master.

OK thanks mate, Ill give that a go.

You dont know the site they released this info on do you?

cheers
bb

Here you go.....
https://www.pioneerelectronics.com/Pioneer/Files/PIB222501_Drives-ChangeATAPICntrllr.pdf