Hi Guys
Problem is I have a Liteon 40125s which until last week was fine now though I can only burn @ 8x without the burnproof coming in and out every few seconds.
I have a Liteon 163D that I'm reading from.
I was getting a fullish mp3 disc in around 2.5 mins but now it's 7.5 at best.
This happens whatever software tried Nero, Cdrwin etc
Any help would be appreciated
Cheers
souness

AMD XP1800/Asus A7N266-VM/256MB PC2100/80GB IBM/LiteOn 40125S/LiteOn 163D /WinXP Pro

The standard buffer underrun prevention techniques should help:
Defrag your Harddrive
Close down all non-essential apps
Don't burn 'on the fly' from a source CD
Have the burner and HD on seperate IDE cables.

hth

Thanks for the reply Darkman
problem is I've tried defragging and everything is closed down.
My problem is that I was burning 'on the fly' and getting great results but now after doing absolutely nothing to the PC the darn thing won't burn (without underrunning) @ anything higher than 8x.
Which is annoying as hell when you just bought a 40x for £35
more help please
souness

btw the burner and reader are setup as secondary and slave
the HD is primary

Had a similar prob.

Re-install via chipset IDE drivers from your motherboard CD and ensure DMA is enabled on all drives.

souness,

mine also acts like a 16x (at best) with on the fly burning.

are you saying that you have hd as primary master and your reader and cdrw on secondary both as slaves?

what is the ideal setup if you have only 2 ide cables and a setup with a cd and cdrw?

souness,
If you are still having problems after a good defragging then I agree with brianc about the via drivers, provided your motherboard uses a VIA chipset. If so get the Via 4-in-1 driver (http://download.com.com/3000-2098-10128724.html?tag=pop).
As well as checking the DMA is enabled make sure that Disconnect is also on - in device manager right click on the burner and select 'properties'.
You could also check what Mode your burner is operating in on your BIOS.
Check the Burner's specs to see if it uses PIO 4 mode or UDMA/33 then check these settings in your system BIOS. Some systems when encountering communications problems with burners 'step down' the operation mode. If the BIOS isn't set to your burners optimal mode then you may get decreased maximum burn speeds.

number9
If you have a HD, Burner and CDROM and want to burn 'on the fly' then the best set-up is to have the HD as Primary Master, CDROM as Primary Slave & the Burner as the Secondary Master. That way the burner is on it's own IDE Channel. IDE can only transfer data in one direction at a time so if you have a Burner on the same channel as a source device the system can't read from the source and send data to the burner at the same time.

Ok messed around with the bios, defragged, checked DMA etc nothing made any difference. I remebered I still had a Lite-on 24/10/40 in the loft so I installed that and burn speed back to normal (although it couldn't quite keep up at the end of a burn) So I re-install the Lite-on 163 and everything is back to how it was. Now burning a full mp3 disc on the fly in just under 2.5 min with reader and writer on the same channel.
I'll set up with the reader as primary slave and the writes a secondary master to see what improvement I get but I'm now happily burning again.
Thanks for all your time and help
much appreciated
souness