Sony DRU-800A problems

[Eerie]

Hello,

I was having a few problems with 2 new Sony DRU-800A drives. Both drives are in the same computer. It is on a MSI Neo2 Platnium motherboard, AMD Athlon XP 64 3200+, 1gb OCZ Platinum Rev 2 RAM, WindowsXP Pro.

The first problem isn't directly realted to the drives. When I check the log from Nero, it lists all my drives (DVDRW, and HDDs) with "DMA: OFF". In windows system manager, all of the channels have DMA enabled, and say either 133 or 66 (the two DVD writers are at 66). In the bios, DMA is also enabled.

The second drive (which I have moved around to different controllers Primary/Slave, Secondary/Master, and Secondary/Slave) will often get "Power Calibration Failed" messesages after taking one or two minutes at the Lead-In when burning. If it gets past that, at 8X it almost always fails. It also has trouble reading RW disks that it previously wrote (when one is in, dvdinfopro, nero say there is no media in the drive)

Another weird thing is both of these drives make a faint clicking noise. It's not very loud, but still noticable. I think it would be odd that both drives would have something wrong with them.

Is there something you have to do to change a drive? Or can you just pull out the old ones and stick the new ones in? I have a spare hard drive I'm going to slap in the box and do a fresh install of Windows on to see what happens.

Any help (especially with the DMA thing) would be much appriciated
Thanks.

[Kadafu]

I don't know if this will help you with your issue Eerie, but it's worth a shot. I have a DRU-800A that simply refused to burn ANYTHING. I fiddled with it for quite some time trying all kinds of stuff, installing and uninstalling drivers/burn software/anything else I could think of. I finally broke down and went into tech help chat with Sony. I notice you are running an Athlon XP 64 3200+ as I am, however we are using different motherboards.

At any rate, the fix for me was to roll back the ATA/IDE controller for the IDE port into which the DRU-800A was plugged to the stock Microsoft driver. I had installed the NVIDIA nForce3 IDE drivers. If you have SATA drives installed, be careful to only roll back the driver on the one that says "parallel".

Right click on "My Computer" and click on the "hardware" tab. Then click on the button that opens Device Manager. Click on the wee plus symbol next to the IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers line. If you have 3rd party drivers installed for the PARALLEL IDE ports, right click on it, then choose properties. Click on the driver tab and hit the "Roll Back Driver" button. Do whatever you need to apply/ok/exit back to your desktop and reboot.

My drive now works flawlessly. Sony is keeping some kind of super secret about their drives not working on nForce3 drivers, they need to add it to their FAQ. Here is a brief excerpt from my chat log with the Sony Rep:

08/13/2005 09:13:11AM Message Sent CSR "In device manager what is listed under ATAPI IDE controllers?"
08/13/2005 09:14:52AM Message Sent CUS "two, nvidia nForce3 250 parallel ATA controller (v2.6) and nvidia nForce3 250 serial controller (v2.6)"
08/13/2005 09:16:31AM Message Sent CSR "Our drives have issues burning with NVIDIA controllers you must change the drivers on the secondary IDE channel to a standard MS driver."
08/13/2005 09:16:50AM Message Sent CSR "If you need help with this call 800-588-3847 or the mother board manufacturer."

Hope it helps!