Pioneer DVR 216D polling computer

I have an issue that popped up recently. After each boot up (Windows XP), the hard drive light would continuous flash every second or so. Was driving me nuts why this was happening. After doing some reading on this, one cause is a DVD drive polling the computer. I had 3 DVD burners. My latest one is the Pioneer DVR 216D. I discovered that this drive is the one that is polling the computer. The other 2 don't. Now at each boot up, I have to open and close the tray to get the hard drive light to stop blinking. I just got a 4th burner. I bought the Pioneer DVR 2910 and after getting it, I found it is actually the same DVR 216D. So now I have two of them. Now at each computer boot up, I have to cycle BOTH trays to get the hard drive light to stop blinking. I don't know why this particular drive is doing this and the other two drives don't do this.

Any ideas why this is happening?


Of the 4 drives, 3 are SATA and 1 is IDE. The two DVR 216D's are SATA.

Your sata controller is ...?

See the Firmware thread. Grab 1.09 for the 216 series. Supposedly corrects the drive light issue. I've observed this with machines at work too, Intel ICH9 SATA controller.

See the Firmware thread. Grab 1.09 for the 216 series. Supposedly corrects the drive light issue. I've observed this with machines at work too, Intel ICH9 SATA controller.

Gah, silly Firefox session restore. Sorry for the double-post.

Flashed both drives to 1.09 (and verified it with InfoTool) and no change. Every boot up I still have to cycle both trays out and in to get the HDD light to quick blinking. Weird deal. I know it's not the SATA port cause I had a different DVD drive hooked to that before and didn't have this issue. Both drives work fine but for some reason they want to poll the computer until the trays are cycled. I think the light reference for the 1.09 had to do with the DVD light, not the HDD light.

Interesting. I've observed the flashing HDD light issue with machines at work, Intel ICH9 SATA controllers. Like yours, the flashing subsides (but does not quite go away completely, pay attention!) after cycling the tray.

The notes for the firmware update state it should resolve that issue. There's nothing more I can say.

The hard drive light blinking after cycling both trays does make the hard drive light quit blinking, COMPLETELY (if nothing else is going on). Only then blinks with hard drive activity like it's supposed to.

And yes, I am paying attention. BTW, I have my computer on the caseless HSPC Tech Station so the hard drive light is sitting there naked right to the side of me at eye level.

Dunno what the odds are with two identical DVD drives both doing this (and my other two don't) if this wasn't something inherant in this particular drive. I'd like to hear from someone who also has this drive. Maybe no one else has noticed this yet because they are not paying attention, heh heh.

Disable AutoRun for the Pioneer DVD 216, using e.g. Tweak UI 2.1, may solve the problem.
http://www.filehippo.com/download_tweakui/.

May be yours is a Gigabyte Motherboard.

My motherboard is in my sig (Asus P5B Deluxe).

I haven't tried disabling Autoplay. I'm a little hesitant to mess with it. Windows XP doesn't handle autoplay particularly well and I've seen issues when messing with it. I think though that when disabling it, some programs will enable it again (like some DVD ripping programs).

Mike89, I have an Asus P5Q Pro board(with Q6600) and I'm experiencing the same thing with my DVR-216. Just flashed it to 1.09 from 1.07 and it's still doing it. Guess disabling autorun is the only way to fix it?

Just cycle the tray after boot up and watch the blinking stop. Takes a couple of seconds. I'd rather do that than mess with autorun. Pioneer said the firmware 1.09 was supposed "to fix the LED issue". Dunno what the hell that even meant (maybe the guy who wrote that description had tired fingers that day or something, meh). If it was referring to the hard drive LED blinking, it didn't fix it.

Cycling my tray after booting into windows doesn't help mine unless it has a disc in the tray. If there is no disc, even after cycling the tray it still blinks about every 1.5 seconds. Do you have a disc in yours when it stops blinking?

Hmm. No I don't have any disks in the trays when I cycle them (I never boot up a computer with disks in the trays unless I forgot to take one out). In my case it works every time. I can even cycle the trays (open and close them) before Windows has finished booting up (when hard drive light is still actively blinking during the boot up at desktop) and it works. I'll either wait for the boot up to be completely done (where the only blinking is that steady blink every second or so), cycle the trays and blinking stops. Or, before the boot up is completely done (at desktop but hard drive light is still actively blinking as Windows is finishing its boot up), cycle trays and when when boot up is finished, the blinking stops.

i feel your pain, you are not alone (in this being a big deal to you, it drove me nuts too) - i had an LG SATA burner that coupled with an NForce 650i board did the same thing.

the only way to stop the blinking light for me was to disable the LG in device manager (XP) until I was ready to use it - at least you can cycle the tray to stop the HD light from constantly blinking, that's better than what i had to do :-)

i now have a new mb - Giga EP45-UD3R and an Optiarc 7200-S - no probs with the HD light thankfully!

Well I still have 2 of these drives running strong and both still do the same thing. Still do the startup routine of cycling the tray on both drives to get the hard drive light to stop blinking. About a month ago a friend of mine also bought two of these drives for his computer (I didn't know he was doing that or I would have suggested he get different drives). They do exactly the same thing on his system, requiring a cycling of both trays at each boot up (including reboot) to get the hard drive light to stop blinking. Dunno what Pioneer did to cause this but I hope I don't ever get another drive that does this. It may not seem like that big a deal but it is kind of irritating to have the hard drive blinking non stop all the time (until cycling the trays) and I wouldn't think it could be all that great for a hard drive to be constantly polled all the time.