Schonhose

Yesterday I had some serious problems with my DVD-burner. I couldn’t burn any DVD or CD, Nero Burning ROM just gave up on it giving the dreadful “Power Calibration” error. So feeling quite adventurous I visited the website of the manufacturer, checked out their support site and found a ROM update.

In general my philosophy is “if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it“, but in this case the burner wasn’t working as expected. So I went ahead with the ROM update, updating it from version 3 to version 9. After the successful update Windows needed a reboot (and another one after that). I started Nero Burning ROM, slid an empty DVD in the burner, selected the files and pressed “Burn”.

There it was again: “Power Calibration” error. So I decided to use some other software. I created an ISO file first, then tried to burn the file with the excellent tool ImgBurn. Immediately my computer became very unresponsive. It eventually came back but while the burning progressed the overall feel was kind of sluggish. But hey, at least the burning worked.

After the burning finished I checked the settings of the IDE controller. What do you know, there was the root of my problems. The primary IDE channel, on which the burner resides, slipped back into PIO mode which is slower than any of the DMA modes. So, setting the PIO mode to DMA would solve the problem.

Well, not quite. I was unable to change the settings and I ended up with removing the drivers of my IDE controllers as well as the drivers of the burner and other DVD player. Needless to say I needed several reboots after that.

After the final reboot all hardware was discovered and reinitialized. A check confirmed both drives are now on Ultra DMA 4. That will beat PIO anytime.