Hi, I have been using a Toshiba SD-R5112 DVD rom drive to back up my dvds for about 2 years using AnyDVD and DVD shrink. I have never had any problems until now. Due to the fact that I can only obtain 8x Verbatim DVD-R and that my Toshiba drive ( even with the latest firmware upgrade) writes these discs at 1x speed, I decided to invest in a new burner. After carefully reading many reviews over the last few weeks I decided to splash out on the Plextor PX-716UF External drive. It is meant to be a very fast ripper and because it would allow me to write 8x media at 4x I was very happy with my selection.....until it was delivered and I installed it. I followed the instruction guide to the letter, after all it should be pretty straight forward. I plugged the USB 2 cable into a port and switched the drive on. Windows XP said that it had detected new hardware, installed it and that my drive was ready to use. I inserted a region2 "Hannibal" DVD into my new drive, configured AnyDVD (latest version) and when AnyDVD had successfully removed all copy protection I opened DVD Shrink (latest version). I clicked open files as normal found the new drive (Eand clicked the Video_TS folder available. Shrink started the first analysis but froze at 64% before giving the following error: Copy Protection Error - The Read Failed Because The Sector Is Encrypted. I searched these forums for a solution and came across a posting that said to set your drives region to a specific region rather than 0. I checked the region setting of the drive, which was indeed 0, and set it to region 2 UK. Tried a different DVD and again got the same error with Shrink. Many more DVDs were tried and still exactly the same thing happened. As an alternative I tried using AnyDVD with the latest CloneDVD. Same problem. Installed latest firmware upgrade successfully. I installed the PlexTools Professional software that came with the drive hoping to be able to use it to set my drive up properly. The only problem was that in the list of devices at the top left window of the application only my Toshiba drive could be found. When I clicked on the Toshiba drive all of the various options came up. Why can't I use the PlexTools software to configure my new drive? Just when I thought that things could not get any worse my PC just shut down and then rebooted, and upon loading all the desktop icons shut down again. Unless I physically shut the power off to the Plextor drive my system will just endlessly shutdown, restart, shutdown etc. on its own. I am then presented with a box from Microsoft sayingthat my PC has just recovered from a serious error. If I turn the burner's power on after it has finished loading everything appears to be fine. The burner will play DVDs from any region due to AnyDVD, it will read the software cd, but I cannot rip a DVD and the constant rebooting can't be good. Somebody please help me. I thought I was buying a dream machine and at the moment it's no good to man or beast. Thanks very much( I know this was a bit long winded. ) Snakeeye. My System: 2.8Ghz processor, 256 Ram, 80Gb HD(70Gb available), XP Home Edition.
I don't have a direct solution but this might help you: When I first got my PX-716UF, I was going to just replace my aging Iomega drive because, like you, I found it wasn't keeping up with the latest media and burn speeds from them even with the latest firmware. However, I decide to keep the Iomega for its DVD-RAM abilities and to rip to an external hard drive. Anyway, I know have 3 drives (4 counting AnyCD Virtual Drive) which include the drives just mentioned and a DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive in my laptop. With the setup I had issues at first that I have now worked through. I too use AnyDVD. I have used DVD Shrink a few times but use CloneDVD2 99.9% of the time to back up my purchased DVDs. I can't remember every thing I did but I will cut and paste snippets from the Plextor thread within CD-Freaks I posted to when I first got my Plextor drive: ---------------------------------------------------- I have a laptop and use an external PX-716UF. I experienced high CPU usage with PlexTools while my external Iomega Super DVD Burner was on and now keep it off when I use PlexTools. Furthermore, I use Lavasoft's Ad-Aware Ad-Watch feature and have found it caused issues while using PlexTools and the PX-716UF itself and now unload it before using either. Anyway, both times my system appeared to have high CPU usage. The Ad-Watch issue was easier to find because I could locate on the list of processes within XP and have everything organized via CPU usage so higher usage items appeared at the top of the list while I had PlexTools running and doing something. ---------------------------------------------------- Here is an original thread I started when I first got my drive: http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?t=127406 ---------------------------------------------------- Another thread: http://club.cdfreaks.com/showthread.php?t=127552 This may or may not help your particular situation but good luck.
