rward Posted March 24, 2002 Report Share Posted March 24, 2002 I am running Retrospect Express 5.6.127 (2.7 Drivers) on a Compaq Presario 5300US with Windows XP (Home Edition) and an internal (IDE) Yamaha CD Burner (CRW3200E) that has a 24x CD-R burn speed. When backing up using Retrospect Express and the Yamaha CD Burner, if I insert a CD-R made by FujiFilm (which is certified as capable of a 24x burn speed) the Yamaha will "hang up" while burning the first CD. If I wait long enough, Retrospect Express issues a 102 Error (The backup computer lost contact with the backup device). On repeated trials, the problem does not occur with exactly the same file, but in the same "general vicinity" -- approximately 200 MB into the backup session. I resolved the problem by using another CD-R (made by Sony) that is certified at a lower burn speed (12x). With Sony 12x media, no "hang" occurs. I cannot blame the Fuji media, as I have had complete success using that media with other applications. For example, I used Fuji 24x media to burn the CD image prepared by Retrospect Express to create a bootable CD (for disaster recovery). Neither can I fault the Yamaha drive, which has performed flawlessly up to this problem. My best guess is that the problem source is the Retrospect driver for the Yamaha. I noted that Retrospect Drivers version 2.7 was necessary for Retrospect Express to recognize the Yamaha drive. This suggests that the driver is new and perhaps contains a bug? If not, what about the Fuji media causes the backup process to hang? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
IrenaS Posted March 28, 2002 Report Share Posted March 28, 2002 On MacFixit.com, Yamaha recently reported that their drives don't work well with Kodak, Memorex, and Maxell media. They suggest Sony, TDK, or Verbatim. While they don't mention FujiFilm per se, it sounds like that medium doesn't work well either. In any case, if the manufacturer has made a recommendation, you'll want to follow it. Remember that Retrospect is using packet-writing, which may use different capabilities of the drive than disc-at-once or track-at-once burning. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cheetah Posted March 29, 2002 Report Share Posted March 29, 2002 I apparantely ran into a problem in the same realm. I have a brand new Hi-Val 24/10/40 and I recently tried a backup using CompUSA 24x CD-R media. The backup part ran fine but when it was verifying, about 3/4 the way through the first disc the drive started ramping up and down and the log was filled with -206 errors stating that the head was dirty, bad media etc. I tried again using SmartBuy 16x CD-Rs and the whole process worked perfectly. No errors, no nothing. So it may have either been an incompatibility with the CompUSA 24x media or it simply couldn't write properly at the full 24x speed. Frank Insolera Jr. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rward Posted March 29, 2002 Author Report Share Posted March 29, 2002 Irena: I tried your suggestion about media. I went to the Yamaha web site and verified that Yamaha recommended only a few CD-R manufacturers, one of which is Sony. So I purchased a set of Sony CD-R disks, certified for 24x burn speed. However, I experienced the same problem that I had experienced with Fuji CD-R disks -- Retrospect Express loses communication with the Yamaha burner (and gives a 102 error). This time the errors happened at about 400 MB into the backup on the first trial, and at 1.2 GB into the backup on the second trial. Since the media cannot be the cause of the problem, and since I have the correct drivers for the Yamaha, and since the Yamaha is certified as a supported CD-R burner, is it now time to conclude that perhaps the Retrospect driver has a bug? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ChuckS Posted April 3, 2002 Report Share Posted April 3, 2002 There is another item to try. Check to make sure that DMA is enabled for the IDE channel that this device is attached to. You will certainly have to do this through the operating system, and may have to in your motherboard BIOS settings, depending on what kind of motherboard you have. With any device over 16x speeds, DMA becomes important, even for packet writing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rward Posted April 6, 2002 Author Report Share Posted April 6, 2002 Thanks for the suggestion, ChuckS. It took a while to track down DMA status in Windows XP, but I did find that the Yamaha burner is working in DMA mode 1. However, you started me thinking. I had assumed that the Yamaha was receiving more data than it (and its buffer) could handle. If DMA was not enabled, the problem actually would have been that the Yamaha was not receiving enough data. So, I asked myself, what else could restrict data flow to the Yamaha? An obvious possibility -- how about the compression option? I tried a backup on the Yamaha, using Sony 32X media, but with no compression of my files. A flawless execution. Problem solved, at least in practice! Is the lack of compression a hinderance? Not for me. Without compression, I used a total of 15 CDs; with compression (and Sony 12X media) I had used a total of 13 CDs. Still, I have to wonder about the efficiency of Retrospect Express' compression algorithm. I know that Windows XP puts a moderately large number of tasks on the CPU, but Task Manager reports that normal background processing uses only between 10% and 15% of my CPU time. My CPU is a 1.1GHz Celeron -- if it cannot keep up with a 32X burner while compressing files, then how fast must the CPU be in order to provide file compression? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cheetah Posted April 8, 2002 Report Share Posted April 8, 2002 When I had the problem with the 24x CD-R media, I was running Windows XP on a P4-1.9GHz platform, so perhaps even that is not enough for the data feed. I need to check the DMA on that channel and try a backup again at 24x. Where in XP did you find the DMA status? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rward Posted April 8, 2002 Author Report Share Posted April 8, 2002 Start -> Control Panel -> System -> Hardware -> Device Manager -> IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers -> Primary IDE Channel (or Secondary IDE Channel) -> Advanced Settings. Note that Device 0 is the "Master" on the IDE channel, and Device 1 is the "Slave". Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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