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Sony DVD+-RW DW-D56A PDS7 on Inspiron 6000


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Sony DVD+-RW DW-D56A PDS7 on Inspiron 6000

 

This DVD+-RW DL is not supported in Retrospect 7, custom configurable, and it hangs around half the time, as follows.

 

Custom Configuration to DVD+R and DVD+RW succeeded, to DVD-R failed, not configurable. Backup to DVD+R waited forever, and progressed at about 1 MB/min. Erasing the DVD+RW did not complete within one hour. I then erased the DVD+RW with another program. Backup to DVD+RW worked about half of the attempts, on other attempts hanged forever. I really got a backup, incremental backups and a successful restore from DVD+RW after all the described attempts. One meagre suspection is, that doing "Preview" in Backup is related to the hanging of the backup.

 

What should be done? Will this DVD drive, which is being heavily used be Dell, at least in Europe, become soon supported?

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The exact version of retrospect is 7.0.7.101 . I just bought it online and it obviously included the Sept RDU update, which is 7.0.7.101. I checked this at once as problems arised. The dell model is Inspiron 6000 N08606a. The drive is Sony DVD+-RW DW-D56A firmware the latest PDS7. The RDI indicated of the custom driver was DVD+RW (RDI 1.56). The OS is WIN-XPHome-SP2-swissgerman. Is this configuration supposed to work, and with all types of DVD?

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ok, more precise version figures are as follows

retrospect professional version - 7.0.326, retrospect update version 7.0.6.108.

os - Microsoft Windows XP Home Edtion, Version 2002, Service Pack 2

configure-devices-environment - 1:0:0, Sony, DVD+-RW DW-D56A, PDS7, SONY DVD+RW - RDI (1.56)

dell notebook model - inspiron 6000 .

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natew, thanks, firmware is the latest (PDS7). And performance is not an issue, it is good.

 

I handle my devicenn.rdi question here as it is related. All devicenn.rdi are from the same dates, at which I configured unsuccessfully and successfully. It seems Retrospect generates, for unsuccessful attempts, a .rdi too.

 

Question 1: one custom driver consists of one or of two .rdi files?

Question 2: some contain TestResult=0x0, others = 0x1. To delete the ones with 0x0?

Question 3: they contain Media=0x8 or Media=0x10 (or 0x0 for the failed). What is what? It seems I should be interested in the Media value list.

Question 4: Environment shows only +RW, although I successfully configured +R before. Am I allowed to use only the last-configured media +RW ?

Question 5: are the backup sets made to +R "lost", no longer accepted by retrospect, as the environment tab says +RW now only?

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Hi

 

My guess is that the RDI files that use the 0X1 are sucessful configures but I am not sure.

 

Did you run the +R and +RW configuration seperately? If so you will only be able to use what you configured last. If you want to use both media types run the configuration again and don't stop between the two media types.

 

Thanks

Nate

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natew, thank you for the information. I will try to have only one .rdi and see what shows up in configure-devices-environment, maybe it is +r. And i will try to put the contents of the two .rdi into one file (it is plain text). I'm curious if such hack succeeds.

 

(as a side remark, I can't afford loosing that much dvd media in failed configurations.)

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One hack goes as follows. Binary merge the lines DriverFlags1 DriverFlags3 Media.

 

 

 

e.g. Media=0x90 is for CD-R plus DVD+RW

 

Media = 0x8 is for DVD+R

 

combines into Media=0x98.

 

 

 

DriverFlags3=0x893 for CD-R plus DVD+RW

 

DriverFlags3=0x883 for DVD+R

 

combines into DriverFlags3=0x893.

 

 

 

Be shure to store it as a new deviceNN.rdi, and keep the original .rdi's nearby, but not in the original place.

 

 

 

A softer hack is as follows. have only the .rdi for the media-at-hand in the Retrospect folder, where the .rdi sit.

 

 

 

Unfortunately the customer driver does not display in Retrospect what it is configured for. Also good to know: Custom configuration is slow, and nothing seems to happen, sometimes for minutes. DVD+RW took 21 minutes, CD-R took 8 minutes. Even the prompt to reinsert the disk is not immediate after eject.

 

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

natew, why don't we post .RDI files? Are they environment-sensitive?

 

here is my device09.rdi (good for CDR, DVD+R,DVD+RW):

[Default]

Retrospect=7.0.326

RDU=7.0.6.108

RDI=0x64

User=0x1

Vendor=SONY

Product=DVD+-RW DW-D56A

Revision=PDS7

ShowType=0x41633035

DriverFlags1=0x70b94f02

DriverFlags2=0x3

DriverFlags3=0x893

DriverFlags4=0x0

DriverFlags5=0x0

Date=27.09.2005

Stamp=0xbf5f35c8

Formatter=0x2

Media=0x98

TestResult=0x1

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Hi

 

The autoconfiguration is a thorough test of the backup and restore capabilities of the drive. Publicly releasing RDI files is risky because all drives don't behave the same in all environments. The biggest concern is that someone could backup but not be able to restore the data.

 

Configuration is a drag but it is a good test of the hardware.

 

Thanks

Nate

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  • 6 months later...

I'm also using this drive on an Inspiron 6000, and trying to do a local backup on TDK 4X DVD+RW disks after a custom configuration. I began a new backup set and the first disk was written in minutes. Wonderful! I watched the laptop spend a couple of hours erasing the second disk last night before leaving it running all night. In the morning, I spent half an hour or so trying to eject this disk before restarting. After a few other attempts, I got Retrospect 7.5 to accept a second disk and erase it. It has apparently been updating the catalog file for two or three hours now. Is this sort of behavior normal?

Thanks for any suggestions.

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Contents of "device00.rdi", the only device configuration file I see, are:

 

[Default]

Retrospect=7.5.251

RDU=7.5.1.105

GenRDU=0.0.000

RDI=0x64

User=0x1

Vendor=SONY

Product=DVD+-RW DW-D56A

Revision=PDS7

ShowType=0x41633035

DriverFlags1=0x70b94f02

DriverFlags2=0x3

DriverFlags3=0x893

DriverFlags4=0x0

DriverFlags5=0x0

Date=4/4/2006

Stamp=0xc0577364

Formatter=0x2

Media=0x10

TestResult=0x1

 

Sorry for the multiple postings; I was using another machine previously, since Retrospect seems iffy when running (e.g. a lot of "not responding") and I'm leery of using cycles Retrospect needs by running other applications, or of risking conflicts, since the process of writing to DVDs seems so fragile. After watching Retrospect work on updating catalog files for about three hours, I stopped it and restarted the laptop so that I could examine the device configuration file without risking any conflicts.

I've been backing up this Dell Inspiron 6000 using Retrospect running on a Mac OS X box with a client on this machine, at about 50 MB/minute, without too much trouble, although I always stumble over a few things. (For instance, just about every time I try to manually eject the DVD when I'm done, I find I can't, and remember I have to start Retrospect again and use it to eject the DVD....) For some reason that copy of Retrospect wanted to start from scratch the last time I wanted to do an incremental backup, so that finally pushed me to move the center of operations to this machine. However, I guess my deeper question is whether this kind of behavior--spending hours on seemingly trivial operations, and fragile behavior--is normal in a Windows environment. If so, it appears that the only way to do local backups on a machine I use for other things is to leave it working on the next DVD in the backup set at night and hope that things like erasing and catalog updates complete before I need to go back to work. Then I could stop the backup and start another DVD at the end of the day. The application itself doesn't tell me what kind of waiting time to expect, and I haven't been able to find any rules of thumb in the manual so far that suggest what's reasonable. In other words, I don't know if I have a problem, or if I should adjust my expectations.

In summary, my first question should be "Should erasing DVDs and updating catalog files in my environment take hours? Or could something be wrong?"

Thanks for any insights.

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Sorry too. Do you run Retrospect on Macintosh, or on Windows?

Redoing a full backup, instead of an incremental, could be your configuration fault, or an indication that it did not count the previous backup. I believe it simply hung, and it hung on a factory-fresh disk.

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Peter, thanks for your feedback.

 

My previous experience was running Retrospect on a Mac, with a client on the Inspiron, to back up the Inspiron over the network. It was the Mac incremental backup of the Inspiron that wanted to start from zero the last time. Now I am trying to get Retrospect running on the Inspiron itself. That's where all the multi-hour delays are happening.

 

Delays like this are *not* normal in the Windows environment, right? Do you find that you can continue to use your Inspiron at all when you are running Retrospect?

 

I should have mentioned that before I tried to use the copy of Retrospect on the Inspiron to back up the Inspiron, I used it to back up an older, Mac OS 9.x machine. That *seems* to have gone well, although I haven't tried to restore any files from the backup set yet. At any rate, I don't think I spent hours waiting for simple operations. (I'm going to start taking much more careful notes until I get this figured out.)

 

Nero: That would be Nero 7 Premium? Nero 6 Reloaded, from Nero.com? Something like that? When I put a blank DVD in my machine, if offers to reformat using Sonic DLA. Would that be equivalent?

 

I thought I saw something in the Retrospect documentation suggesting that I should only use Retrospect for erasing the DVDs, because of that unique format. I may have misunderstood that. I'll review it.

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Peter (et al.), don't spend a single additional brain cell on this! I had a problem erasing one disc with Sonic DLA at first. The second try seemed to do it, but the drive did not want to eject and I had to restart the machine. I tried that one with Retrospect, which gave me a -206 error ("...dirty heads, bad media, etc."). Now I'm sailing along with another disc at about 330 MB/min, and it's possible that the one bad disc was tripping me up the whole time. (Cross your fingers....) It would be nice if Retrospect could handle that more gracefully, but the fact that I couldn't even eject it after erasing it in Sonic DLA suggests that the problem is deeper. Perhaps Retrospect is doing the best it can with what Windows gives it, or the problem is embedded in the way DVDs work, or something....

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After screaming through one DVD, Retrospect raced through another and hung at the end of the process. After that, it hung on three more DVDs--never used before or even removed from the container they came in, aside from being erased in Sonic DLA, which didn't stop Retrospect from wanting to erase them again.... I will say that it's *playing* a movie on a double-layer DVD right now, and doing just fine.

 

I suspect that the drive may be dying and will see what Dell has to say. According to what I've found online, it wouldn't be the first Sony DW-D56A to die before its time...but of course you wouldn't expect a million people whose drives have *not* failed to leave much of a trace for Google. We'll see.

 

It would be nice if a program (Retrospect, or Windows, or something else in the mix) would notice that an operation that should take 30 seconds has taken a couple of hours, and display an alert that says something like "It's not me! This shouldn't be happening!" But perhaps there are many variables involved, and everything on the machine seems to be hosed by contention problems or something when this happens. It's probably much harder to do than I imagine.

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Jacob, for me Retrospect works well on the very same inspiron 6000 with the same Sony DVD+RW56....etc.

 

I disabled Sonic DLA, and I disabled autorun (from Windows, disable is done in TweaUI XP), and yes it is one of the Neros. You should already have known all three as it is the serious way to do DVD. Now you know.

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Jacob I remember now that the autorun feature of Windows didn't interact well with retrospect. When you insert the blank DVD, Windows (or DLA) capture it, as well as Retrospect. Of course i don't know what is the winner, but DLA, autorun and disc burning with drag-and-drop are all disabled on my system. I dislike them anyway.

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Peter, my interest in industrial strength backup options drove the DVD burner purchase, so Nero's been off my radar--although it's good to know about it. (Searching suggests it is the gold standard in the Windows world.) If I can just get Retrospect to work as seamlessly as I think it should, that will be serious enough for me, for now! smile.gif

 

To do that, I'll have to find out if the problem is in the drive or in the media. Dell support forums are full of complaints about the DW-D56A, although it sounds like yours has been working well. I haven't spent any time on diagnostics yet today, except for looking at Dell's site to figure out what my next steps should be, but will report back if I discover anything that may be useful to others.

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  • 4 weeks later...

I'm still hoping to come back with something useful, but am not there yet.

 

I've spent some time with a Dell technician who was oblivious to the idea of a hardware problem and got me to update my BIOS *then* to test DVD+RW writing with Sonic DigitalMedia (an option I was unaware I had). It worked just fine, and his conclusion was that we'd probably fixed the problem. However, we didn't try burning until after the BIOS update, so it wasn't exactly scientific. Since then I also had a disc hang in Sonic when burning to it. I erased one disc in Retrospect which hung after apparently filling it with data. Attempting to erase this disc again in Retrospect got me a warning re: dirty heads or bad media (-206, I think). Attempting to erase with Sonic got an error, too. If it's not a hardware problem per se, it's something at a pretty low level, such that Sonic and Retrospect both depend on it, and it's probably intermittent.

 

Seeing some reviews of different DVD+RW brands with occasional complaints of bad batches of discs made reducing that possibility look like a good idea. I'd been working with TDK DVD+RWs; I bought a package of HP and had similar problems with a couple of those.

 

The diagnostic tree of the technician I spoke to included blowing everything away everything on my hard drive and reinstalling Windows from scratch; not very appealing to someone who has been unable to back up his data! But even this technician had a couple of other ideas, and talking to another Dell technician may give me better results.

 

The brief glimpses I've had of what Retrospect is *trying* to do (e.g. burning at 300+ MB/minute) are encouraging. I'm pretty confident that good things are waiting to happen. I'll be back when I find out how.

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