Failure to manually configure drive - repeatedly requests insertion of CD

[markgunning]

I am delighted with the way this product worked on my home system (WIndows XP Professional SP1 with a Sony

DRU-510A DVD/RW drive) but am unable to get Professional 6.5 to manually configure my drive on my work PC.

I have an IBM ThinkPad T40 running Windows XP Professional SP1 with all the latest updates and with the latest

firmware for my drive. The drive is the Matshita UJDA745 CD-RW/DVD ROM 16x/10x/24x/8x combo drive. When

I try to manually configure it I am asked to insert a CD even when a CD-R is in the drive. I then comply and close

the drive and after about 20 seconds and an attempt to read the disc information the disc is ejected and I am asked

to insert a CD. I originally had IBM (Veritas/Sonic) Record Now and DLA installed along with NTI Drive Image and

Backup Now 3.0, Ahead Nero 6.0, PowerQuest Drive Image 7, and Acronis True Image. The IBM, NTI, and Ahead

software worked fine. Drive Image backed up the system but encountered a fatal error when verifying the first CD.

In order to elminate any possibiliy of interference I uninstalled all the above software, uninstalled Retrospect, then

rebooted, and reinstalled Retrospect. It still repeatedly asks me to insert a CD. As an act of desperation I edited the

registry to turn off Autorun in case that was causing a problem. This did not help. Any suggestions would be very

much appreciated at this point. Thank you.

 

[natew]

Hi

 

My first guess is that one of those other programs is quietly accessing the drive all of the time. This is interrupting Retrospect when it is trying to communicate with the drive - hence the failure to recognize when a disk has been inserted.

 

Uninstalling any programs that might interfere is the optimal solution but may not be realistic. Try using the MSCONFIG utility in WindowsXP to disable any other un-needed software at start up. After you get the driver configured in Retrospect you can try turning it back on.

 

Nate

[markgunning]

Thanks for the suggestions. I went into MSCONFIG and there were no other programs which run at startup that are

accessing the CD drive as far as I can determine. Is there some way to monitor CD drive accesses?

 

I have completely uninstalled all other software which might access the CD drive. I also uninstalled and reinstalled

Restrospect. Same symptoms - it tries to get the disc informatoin and then acts as if the drive is empty and asks me

to insert a CD. As soon as the Checking disk informatoin ... message appears the drive spins down and the tray is

ejected. The exact messages which appear are: Please insert a CD/DVD disc, then Checking disc informatoin ..., then

Please insert a CD/DVD disc.

 

Dantz customer service suggested trying to configure the drive with a CD-RW disc first rather than a CD-R disc

but this did not work either.

 

I set the AutoPlay setting for Blank CD to Take no action but when I start Retrospect it appears to be changing

this back to the default, or something is, because after I try the configure, it fails, and I exit Retrospect I check

the setting and it is back to Prompt me each time to choose an action. I also turned off the built-in Windows drag-

and-drop recording feature for the drive. This made no difference either.

 

In order to ensure that the drive itself was not having a hardware problem I reinstalled Nero 5.5 and burned a data

CD and there were no errors or problems.

 

I have read all posts in the Windows Products: Professional and Device and Hardware Compatibility-Windows

forums that seemed even remotely related to my problem. I have also read all the relevant sections in the online

help. I can find no information that addresses this issue. Any assistance that ANYONE can provide would be

greately appreciated. This problem is preventing me from buying Retrospect Professional for my work ThinkPad.

[natew]

Hi

 

As a last chance you can install the ASPIINST program in the Retrospect folder. You will also need to get the latest patch for ASPI 4.71 from Adaptec. ASPI changes the way that Retrospect talks to your drive. You should not need this update in XP but it helps on occasion.

 

Good luck!

Nate

[markgunning]

Thanks for this suggestion. Are there any disadvantages to using ASPI rather than the regular method that Retrospect

uses to access the drive. I am willing to try ASPI if there are no other options but I want to ensure that this will not

reduce the reliability of the drive or cause it to be significantly slower, etc. When you say that it will access the drive

differently is this an equally fast and reliable alternative?

 

Also, if I install this will it affect other software? Will this change the way other software (such as Nero) accesses the

drive as well or will it only affect Retrospect?

 

Thanks very much for your help.

 

[natew]

Hi,

 

I can't say for sure on the speed issue. I have talked to some people who say that ASPI is faster. Personally I can't tell any difference. Same goes for reliability.

 

I have yet to hear of ASPI interfering with other programs. ASPI is just 4 files that get installed on your system + a registry entry or two. If it causes problems you can just remove the files.

 

Nate

[markgunning]

Thanks for your continuing help with this maddening problem. I have learned that I am not alone. I looked through

the Windows XP hardware forum and found numerous people who are experiencing this problem in a variety of

circumstances. This confirms my thought that this is not a Retrospect problem but a Windows XP problem. I have

had a ridiculous number of problems with writing to CD/DVD-RW drives under Windows XP Professional. The

only good thing to come out of them is that I learned about Retrospect after trying 6 or 7 of the more widely

known products and not being satisfied with any of them. Now I know that it was Windows all along that was the

problem. But I am glad to have learned of your product because it is superior to all the rest.

 

My recent attempts to fix this include commenting out an entry with msconfig, installing the ASPI drivers as you

suggested, completely disabling AutoPlay following instructions given on the Windows XP forum, restoring the

AutoPlay settings to their original values (since ASPI was not installed originally this was worth a shot). None

of this has been of any help.

 

I found an Operations Log so I thought it might be helpful to give its contents related to Custom Configuration:

Setup test: Successful

Default setup test: Successful

Drive type test: Successful

Drive initialization test: Successful

Disc information test: Failed

 

So at least we know where the problem is to some extent. Since I am now convinced that there is something (or

multiple things) inherently wrong with Windows XP when it comes to CD/DVD-RW drives I realize that there may

not be anything further you can do to help. I would suggest that you continue to research this issue because as

more of you customers make the mistake of moving to Windows XP this will become an increasingly common

probllem.

 

Thanks for any additional ideas you may have.

 

Mark

 

[natew]

Mark

 

I'm sorry to hear it didn't work out with the CD drive.

This kind of thing is always a letdown. Keep in mind that you can backup your laptop over the network if you like. That way you can use a drive that will cooperate with XP more readily.

 

Thanks for your patience

Nate

[markgunning]

Nate,

 

 

 

Is there any way to cause retrospect to use track-at-once (TAO) rather than packet writing? I will be unsing only

 

CD-R media on my laptop.

 

 

 

Thanks,

 

Mark

 

 

[markgunning]

Update:

 

 

 

I uninstalled Retrospect, Nero, and InCD, rebooted, installed only InCD, rebooted, then inserted a CD-RW disc.

 

InCD successfully formatted the disc. I used Windows Explorer to copy almost 400 MB of information to the disc

 

and this worked without problems. I then tried accessing the information from other programs and this worked

 

as well. Lastly I tried doing a drag-and-drop in Windows Explorer and this worked as well.

 

 

 

So it is now clear that the drive does work when performing packet writing using InCD version 3.34.0.

 

The previous problems I had with Nero and the Windows packet writing software turn out to be caused by the

 

fact that the CD-RW disc I happened to use was for a drive that was 16x or faster and mine is 10x max.

 

 

 

This points the finger back at Retrospect. If InCD can do packet writing to the drive successfully then why is

 

Retrospect having problems? It no longer appears to be an instrinsic Windows XP problem since InCD is able

 

to work fine. The only difference is that InCD may be using the Nero ASPI layer but I do not know if it is.

 

 

 

After this I installed Retrospect again and tried configuring the drive with a new CD-RW disc that was the

 

same type that worked with InCD - it failed in the Disc information test just like before. I then tried a CD-R

 

with the same result. I then tried the disc which InCD had formatted and written to and this failed also.

 

 

 

Nate - is there anyone else at dantz whom you can consult on this issue? I very much want to purchase two

 

copies of your product for my work and home computer but I must have a resolution to this problem in order

 

to do so. Now that a different product has succeeded in using the drive in packet mode there should be no

 

reason why the manual configuration in Retrospect continues to fail.

 

 

 

Thanks for your previous assistance and any additional assistance you are able to provide.

 

 

 

Mark

 

 

[natew]

Hi

 

You may have done this already but...

Did you ever try uninstalling all of your CD writing programs and then using Retrospect?

 

The deal with the configurator is this- Retrospect sends a series of commands to the device. If the commands are completed sucessfully and the data on the configuration disk can be read correctly, the drive passes the test and a driver is created. If any of those commands fail the drive cannot be trusted so whole process fails. I suspect Retrospect is sending a command that the drive just can't handle properly- other programs however do not use that particular command so they run fine.

 

In order to follow up on this you will need to contact Dantz Technical Support in the US.

 

Nate

 

[AmyJ]

The auto-configurator may not work with all drives under all configurations. We expect to make improvements to the auto-configurator through driver updates and application updates in the future to allow a wider range of drive support.

 

Drives which do not pass the auto-configurator tests are not supported by Dantz Technical Support at this time.

 

[markgunning]

Nate,

 

Thanks very much for all your suggestions. At this point I have reluctantly decided to abandon my attempts to get

Retrospect to work on my ThinkPad. I found out today that IBM ships something called Rapid Restore with all its

ThinkPads now and this program allowed me to backup my system to a hidden partition and also create a bootable

disaster recover CD-R set. This was on the system all along but I did not discover it until today. So my problem

is solved by this other software for my ThinkPad but I still intend to buy a copy of Retrospect for my home

computer since the drive on that one (Sony DRU-510A) does work with Retrospect.

 

Thanks again for all your help,

 

Mark