Main Area and Open Discussion > General Software Discussion

ASUS mobo dead

(1/6) > >>

Carol Haynes:
[Note I have gone through and changed the title of this thread. It was originally called "Strange problem with ImgBurn (I think)" but ultimately turned out to be a motherboard problem]

Just curious if anyone else has come across behaviour like this?

Over the last few days I have had a number of occasions where ImgBurn has failed to burn an ISO image to a DVD5 disc. In each case it has siad the device was not ready halfway through the burn. The operation cancelled but the drive kept spinning and nothing would eject the disc except for a system restart. Upon restarting the BIOS cannot detect my DVD drives !! If Windows starts there are all sorts of problems not least of which is that the system is unusable because there is obviously an interrupt hogging a large proportion of the CPU time - eg. the mouse moves only in fits and bursts. The drives don't appear in the devices list (but the IDE interface does and it says it is working normally!).

The only way to recover the system is to turn off the computer, remove power completely and leave it long enough for all capacitors in the system to discharge. When it starts up again everything is fine.

At first I thought it was a hardware problem but I can burn the same image on the same drive using Nero. On one occasion a DMA/CRC error was reported by Nero but it was handled properly and the device unlocked.

Is it possible for an instruction to a controller to block access to drives in this way until capacitors are discharged?

I don't think it can be a dying IDE controller because I have my hard discs on the same controller and have had no issues at all with them. Granted they are on channel 0 and the two DVD-R DL are both on channel 1 so maybe it is a problem with one channel. However, it is strange that I only seem to have this problem with ImgBurn. Could it just be a bug in the handling of one unusual error type? I have noticed in the past the ImgBurn doesn't handle errors totally gracefully and often takes a long time to release a disc - even just for a simple bad block error.

Any ideas?

4wd:
Just curious if anyone else has come across behaviour like this?

...

The only way to recover the system is to turn off the computer, remove power completely and leave it long enough for all capacitors in the system to discharge. When it starts up again everything is fine.

Any ideas?
-Carol Haynes (September 20, 2008, 04:42 AM)
--- End quote ---

The only times I've had ImgBurn go toes up on me is when trying to:
1) write to poor quality discs.
2) write to a disc at too fast a speed.
3) some kind of ASPI layer conflict from other software.

In all the above, never has it required removing power from the system to fix.  If ImgBurn didn't want to exit then killing it with TaskManager let me open the drive, (I think anyway, it's been a while since ImgBurn has failed, 2+ months and 100+ discs).

However, I have had previous faults that cause the same kind of problem, (and in almost all cases that I remember), it was caused by an interface cable coming loose, (not necessarily for the burner).

Since upgrading my system, reinstalling the OS and using only TY DVD-Rs I've not had any problems at all with ImgBurn, (and it's the only thing I use).

It used to be that any kind of optical writer was to be positioned as the master on any IDE controller.  I don't know if that still holds true or not but I do know that if my BenQ DW1540 is not the master then I have pretty much no hope of writing a good disc, {was on the same bus with a Sony AW-G170A (Optiarc 7170) as master}.  My old NEC 3520 and 2500 were pretty iffy as slaves also.

Nowadays I have a Pioneer 212 (SATA) and the Sony AW-G170A (IDE), the Sony is on the only IDE bus as master with a 400GB HDD as slave.

You could try changing your IDE cabling so that you have the one DVD-DL as master on each bus with the HDDs as slave.

Have you checked the System Event Log?  You might find more info, (errors/warnings), in there.

Carol Haynes:
Oddly there is nothing in System or Application Event logs at all.

I'll try removing ImgBurn and installing the latest build from scratch and see if something somewhere has got corrupted?

As for burning stuff - I have two Pioneer DVR-111 drives on IDE-1 (both master and slave) and they have both worked fine for well over a year now.

I use Verbatim DVD-R x 16 discs and Verbatim DVD-R DL x8 discs - both of which seem to give reasonably consistent results on my system. I never burn them at full speed (even though my drives support those speeds). I usually use 50% of rated speed for the discs.

As far as I know I haven't got any software that adds an ASPI layer.

If reinstalling ImgBurn doesn't solve the problem I will try a cable swap.

Actually I have ordered a replacement mobo just in case. I have 3 desktop systems all based on 939 technology so getting a mobo while I still can means I have some reserve plan if something goes pear shaped!

Anyone got any experience with the ASRock 939N68PV-GLAN mobo - it seems to be one of the few 939 boards that is still available. Amazon UK still had a few in stock at ~£40 - which didn't seem a bad price. Main criticisms I read were the ATX connector is poorly sites, SLI graphics cards are  tight fit w.r.t. memory cards and there is no Firewire.

I can't see any of these are huge negatives (I have a number of Firewire cards sitting doing nothing so that isn't an issue), the card has integrated nVidia 7 Series graphics (with both D-Sub and DVI inputs which can run dual monitors). I don't play games so that wouldn't be an issue (and I have an SLI graphics card if needed anyway). Connectors only really have to be connected once so they are't really a huge issue AFAICS.

My current ASUS board only seems to be available second hand at ridiculous prices (i.e. higher than the price I paid when new - which was expensive).

Shades:
With IDE, was it not that the slowest device dictates the speed of all devices connected to the same cable?

Anyway, when I was in the PC repair business this was a golden rule. IDE harddisks are already slow enough as they are, why cripple them even more?

Carol Haynes:
I think with the old ATA66 cables that was the case but with the introduction of ATA100 I think that was less of a problem.

Having said that I prefer to keep hard discs and optical discs separate.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page