SATA Optical Burning Issues on DS3

Hello I put together 2 computers using the DS3 rev 3.3. On both of them I ordered the Samung SH-183L. On both setups I can read CDs and DVDs fine, but both of them have errors when trying to burn. It starts off alright, then after it burns for a few minutes it will just crap out and says something along the lings of 'the device in not available'. I ran the nero cd/dvd speed write test, and I'm not sure how it's supposed to look, but the write speed was all over - jumping from 12x to 26x, to 8x, to 20x and so forth the entire time and never stayed at a steady pace at all.

I'm only left to think that it's something up with the SATA drivers. I have both the system hd and the dvd drive plugged into the orange ports, where I was under the impression that I would not have to install the Jmicron drivers and was the entire reason for me to use the Optical DVD drive to begin with. I'm pretty sure my bios settings are the way the are supposed to, in IDE mode. I just don't know why they can't finish a burn. It really isn't too much of a hassle to pop my hard drive into my other PC when I need to back stuff up, but it's a pretty big inconvenience if I have to do it every time I need to burn a quick CD or DVD.

Edit: This is in WinXP Pro SP2

Edit 2: Just threw this into my other rig (Nforce 4 chipset) and it worked flawlessly. This DS3 is starting to tick me off. Grrrrr.

I'd say the driver or firmware for the DVD is flakey, see if there is a new one.

I had the same problem with a LiteOn DVD on an ASUS p4p800. It never did work properly and I just replaced it with a Panasonic and it was crappy too until they updated the firmware.

Come to think on it, my Plextor 760A often didn't complete DVD writes on my P5WDH until they updated the firmware. So it happens.

I've got a DS3 3.3 with a Samung SH-183L and everything is working here. You're in luck because I love to solve computer problems. So, let's start with some questions, get on the same page and come up with some theories to test.

Questions:

Let's get on the same page!
One major difference that's tough (time consuming) to overcome is you're running XP SP2 and I'm running Vista 64-bit. So, we'll have different drivers. But, let's see if we can solve this problem anyway.

Theories to Test

I guess the first thing to do is after you get on the same page as me, try to burn something. Who knows, maybe it will work. If it doesn't, let's check your BIOS. Since you're running XP SP2, It should look like this:
If your BIOS didn't look like the above and you made changes, try burning and see what happens. Are we working yet? If not, let's try running with AHCI drivers. Getting the Intel ICH8 to work with AHCI drivers is kind of a trick. For some reason, Intel never released AHCI drivers for the ICH8 and Windows XP. However, someone figured out how to extract them from Intel's Matrix Storage software and modify the install files so the drivers will work. If you're willing to do some reading and try this, refer to this post:
Don't download the latest version of Intel Matrix Storage Manager. Download the previous version, 6.2.1.1002. I would be very interested in seeing if this works. Also, this would enable NCQ on drives that support it. Anyway, it's time for bed! Let me know what happens!

Here's an excellent blog entry concerning the ICH8/AHCI issue:


It's well written and easier to understand than wading through the posts at http://kerneltrap.org/node/7582. The entry is actually based on the original post on kerneltrap. Plus, the person posted a direct link to Intel's F6 floppy creation utility and posted the modified iaahci.inf and txtsetup.oem files. This makes things a whole lot easier!

Make sure to load the JMicron driver along with the Intel ICH8/AHCI driver during the XP install if you can. If you do, make sure you download the newest version direct from JMicron:

Thanks a lot for the suggestions Atomic, but I seemed to have figured out the issue very, very late last night.

I ended up reinstalling windows with the newest Jmicron drivers and with the DVD drive plugged into one of the purple (Gigabyte/Jmicron controller) and it now works flawlessly. I ran the CD write test with nero and it performed perfectly, and even burned an audio cd and a data dvd both to full capacity and both work fine. Before it would start to burn then slow down and eventually just stop working and have an error.

So basically I'd like to apologize for wasting your time, but I definately think that this thready should be sticked because that is a lot of good information for anyone having troubles burning with these weirdo P965/ICH8 motherboards.

I have one of those boards.

My DVD burner experiences similiar problems too. I do not want to go thru a whole new install, so is there a way for me to replace the current drives with the install ones you use during the F6?

I have not had too much trouble burning, but my DVD drive spins up slow and sometimes will not read a disk till I do a reboot.

I never had a problem reading a disc, ever. It was only during burning where it would get all funky. You can try plugging the DVD drive into one of the purple connectors without reinstalling the drivers and see how that works.