My NEC-2500 DVD RW won't read any commercial dvd's. It reads cd-r's fine but isn't recognizing dvd's. I've been using this drive to burn backups of commercial dvd's with "dvdshrink" for the last year and have had no problems at all. Except for some reason last month our encoding speed was slowing down from 4,000 kps to 1500-1800 kps. I read some forums about improving the encoder speed and they suggested to change the transfer rate from "plo" to "dma" transfer. I tried to do that by selecting "dma transfer" through device manager with no luck. I than tried to uninstall the "ide/ata controllersrimary ide channel" and rebooted my computer. Immediately after this the problem with my dvd writer started. According to device manager all drivers are working properly for the dvd rw, primary channel. Please help, any suggestions? my current sys: win xp, intel pentium 1.9 ghz, 1 gig memory, 80 gig hard drive 2mb buffer, NEC- 2500-dvd rw.
To make sure that I'm understanding you correctly your drive quit reading commercial DVDs after you uninstalled the Primary IDE from Device manager and rebooted, correct? Have you tried uninstalling just the drive itself? Are you able to test the drive's function in another PC?
Yes that is correct and no unfortunately I can't test the dvd rw drive in another pc 'cause this is the only one I have. Do you think the drive just quit for some reason?
If your drive's on the primary IDE would it be safe to say that it's slave to the hard drive? Are you able to or have you already tried connecting the drive to the Secondary IDE as Master if possible with the appropriate jumper setting on the back of the drive? In Device Manager is the Current Transfer Speed listed as DMA? Did you try uninstalling just the drive itself as opposed to the entire IDE? Burners don't last forever so there is a chance that your drive is on its way out but we're not ready to settle for that quite yet
Yes I tried uninstalling the dvd drive and after restarting the drive was automatically installed again. I tried to have it read a simple dvd and it doesn't work still. No the current transfer rate is plo and I can't get it to stay on dma transfer. I'll try your suggestion of switching it to the secondary ide channel physically.