EPoX 8K7A+ and Ricoh 12x10x32x8x

[Zorro]

Recently bought the above CD Burner and DVD drive.

Placed it in my system and it does not work.

With an audio CD, the system believes it is an audio CD and will play it.
With a data CD the system believes it is an audio CD and will crash, either CDPlayer software, or explorer.
With a DVD the system thinks it is an excuse to take down Explorer.
When writing a CD it is fine.

If I have a CD in the drive it won't boot, just gets to windows and crashes.

What it appears to be is if data is read from the drive it dies.

When I use the drive on a clean install of 98se, it works perfectly, reads, writes, reads DVDs etc.

When I install the motherboard drivers it stops working.

I have just 98se and the motherboard drivers installed and the drive is no longer really usable...

Any ideas why?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Zorro.

[Superman]

Try going Control Panel-System-Device Manager and click on your drive. Then go to Properties-Settings and check the following (it's what mine has):

Disconnect
Sync Data Transfer
DMA
(and Auto-Insert if you want)

Then if it doesn't work, try disabling DMA.

[Zorro]

Disconnect is on, sync off, DMA on.

I'll try it with DMA off...

Btw, what does sync do?

Zorro.

[Samuknow]

How do you have your drives set up? Secondary IDE. Master slave? This can be very important on multi drive systems.

What worked best for me is. Harddrive- Primary master
DVD rom - Secondary master
Burner - Secondary Slave.

This runs great and no problems.

[Zorro]

Drives setup:-

4x40Gig on onboard RAID channels.
1xMemorex CD Rom Drive (Master, secondary channel)
1xRicoh Burner/DVD (Master, primary channel)

Best way to setup afaik.

Zorro.

[Samuknow]

Originally posted by Zorro
Drives setup:-

4x40Gig on onboard RAID channels.
1xMemorex CD Rom Drive (Master, secondary channel)
1xRicoh Burner/DVD (Master, primary channel)

Best way to setup afaik.

Zorro.

Just a suggestion here, Try putting the burner as the secondary. I had the burner as primary on my machine and had endless troubles. And not to sound obvous here. Recheck the jumpers. Also go to system properties and remove both drives and reboot to reload the drivers. I know that some CD drives do not like DMA enabled.

[Zorro]

At work at the moment.


But intend to fiddle more when I get back home...

Jumpers on Drives are set properly cause each CD drive has its own IDE channel and they report as master......

I'll switch the channels and remove DMA...

Then maybe take a hammer to it...

Cheers for the help....


Zorro...

[Samuknow]

Originally posted by Zorro
At work at the moment.


But intend to fiddle more when I get back home...

Jumpers on Drives are set properly cause each CD drive has its own IDE channel and they report as master......

I'll switch the channels and remove DMA...

Then maybe take a hammer to it...

Cheers for the help....


Zorro...

I'll check back to see how it goes. I like the hammer trick. Works on cars too...........LOL

[Superman]

Originally posted by Samuknow


I'll check back to see how it goes. I like the hammer trick. Works on cars too...........LOL

Let me know too. I'm interested. Hammers are for wimps. Now sawzalls (sp?) are the answer

[Zorro]

Good morning all


Happier today cause it works at last.

It was DMA that the drive didn't like.

Performance has taken a large hit, but it works so I can't complain that much...

Write buffer now goes as low as 80%, used to only hit 97%...

DVD reads ok aside from the occasional jitter..

If anyone should find a solution so that DMA could work, then let me know

I tried the hammer trick on an old CD-Rom of mine, and since it then stopped working at all I decided not to try it on the £150 drive

Is a form of therapy I guess, beating duff hardware...

Zorro.

[Samuknow]

Glad to see you got it working. Unfortunatly some drives just won't work well with DMA enabled. I have a CD Rom that despises it. My burner doesen't mind either way. If I run into something I will let you know...........

[EPoX Tech]

Have you tried the latest 4.34 via 4-in-1's - they fix a lot of compatibility issues with ATAPI devices.

Other than that we would ask if you have contacted Ricoh for their comments on this.

[Zorro]

Downloaded 4.34s when I found the problem, no difference unfortunately...

I appreciate the reply, no I have not contacted Ricoh about this, I intend to, but it is easier to start here, both for replies from you and from other forum users.

I am impressed with the commitment you show by helping out here, and I love the board, fast as lightning

One of the other reasons I have for asking here is that I know a number of people who have the same drive and experience no problems with it. For all I know I just have a faulty DMA drive, but none of them have the same motherboard as I do.... So it rates as 'Worth a try'..

Should I get a solution from Ricoh I'll post it here for others to see.

Zorro.