Pioneer 103/A03 and 104/A04 drives suffer from UDMA bug

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#1

I just posted the article Pioneer 103/A03 and 104/A04 drives suffer from UDMA bug.

DrByte used our newssubmit to tell us that Pioneer drives are currently suffering a bug that might affect also some of our visitors. The bug is in the A03/103 and the A04/104 DVD records…

Read the full article here:  [http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/4315-Pioneer-103_A03-and-104_A04-drives-suffer-from-UDMA-bug.html](http://www.cdfreaks.com/news/4315-Pioneer-103_A03-and-104_A04-drives-suffer-from-UDMA-bug.html)

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#2

This problem is not limited to Win 2k/XP, and neither is is limited to Pioneer or UDMA (don’t forget that DVR-A03 doesn’t support UDMA at all, it only supports MW-DMA). The same problem occurs under Win 98, as well as sometimes when using a Mitsumi 480A

#3

Depends on your motherboard. On my new P4 board its ok with dma on my old P3 600 it was not :9

#4

Did you try updating the chipset drivers ? or are the drives realy just messed?

#5

For me, it can’t be the chipset or chipset drivers: Its an Intel BX440 chipset.

#6

I read recently that Pioneer DVD-R drives do not like 80 pin cables. Here is an excerpt from dvdwriters.co.uk - “It is recommended not to use an 80-pin IDE cable for reasons only known to Pioneer.” This was in a review for the A04, but may apply to the A03 as well. I would hope that Pioneer will come out with a firmware that takes care of this. :slight_smile:

#7

I am running XP Pro abit kg-7,athlon 1.8xp 1.5 gig of ram and I have to use PIO mode dma made coasters everytime. :frowning:

#8

Hmm… I’m using a 104 with XP Pro on a Gigabyte P4 mobo (845e chipset), 2.0ghz, 512mb ram and its working fine for me (UDMA).

#9

Maybe if this guy would just stop doing other tasks when he’s burning a DVD the underrun problems wouldn’t be a problem. Of course the UDMA problem would still be there unfortunately.

#10

I never said that the underrun is a problem: I get “communication failure” after 300-1100 MB if I use DMA mode and then have a “coaster” (not really, I always try such things with dvd-rw). This is a communication time-out, not an underrun.

#11

I’ve put my A03 drive in a firewire case (pyro ads), ‘most’ of the problems are solved. But CD-RW is parctically a no go with me. I still had coasteres in special occasions, but for normal use, it does the job fine.

#12

I have a Pioneer DVD-ROM DVD-103. When I read from that and burn ‘on-the-fly’ with latest nero to my Lite-On 24102B I get a communication error. Both drives have the latest firmware, and it only happens when UDMA is enabled. Pioneer doesn’t seem to have addressed this at all either. :frowning:

#13

I’ve got a A03 for over 6 months now and on my old PC with BX chipset, I get the communication error, in another PC it runs flawlessly.

#14

Hmmm… I have a brand-new A03 (bought it some two weeks ago), and DriveInfo says “PIONEER DVD-RW DVR-103 1.49” about it. Haven’t done much with it yet, ut haven’t run into any problems with it until now. Must say that I always create an image file on my harddisk, and then burn that onto a blank CD or DVD. Could that help, perhaps?

#15

i had exactly the same problem on a dvd-103s ,drive wouldnt work at all in dma mode, i tried… 1. dvd-103s firmware update 2. motherboard bios update 3. moving the drive on primary and secondary IDE channels on master and slave settings The only way i could get the drive to work was in pio mode in XP, when set to DMA mode the secondary controller was showing the drive as “Ultra DMA Mode 2” (reading this probably from drive/bios information". My last ditch attempt was the one that got the drive working in DMA mode, and funny enough, i got it working by disabling UDMA mode for the channel in was using in the bios, then when i reset DMA mode in XP it was reading as “Multi-Word DMA mode 2” this got the drive working ok. if it helps im using a celeron 633 processor, via apollo chipset on motherboard (VIA Apollo Pro VT 82C694X) so there you are, all this faffing around, and to think it worked perfectly on my 440BX pII :-z anyway, hope this helps. PrImED.