Optical drive programs freezing

[doveman]

I've sent my brother his nice new PC and he's quite happy with it but he's having a lot of problems with programs that use the optical drive.

I installed a variety of programs to cover the tasks he does, including BurnAware Free. I just observed over Teamviewer that this locks up and it was impossible to kill, either via the TaskManager, taskkill or Process Hacker. It had two programs running, AudioCD.exe and MP3Disc.exe, neither of which I could kill, even after he ejected the drive (I've found sometimes that programs get locked up whilst trying to access the disc, so removing it can sometimes unfreeze them).

I then tried Ashampoo Burning Studio but that locked up and wouldn't let me kill it either. I can understand it might have been fighting for the drive with BurnAware but I still should have been able to kill them.

He also ripped a DVD the other day and said it seemed to be slower than on his old Pentium 3 900Mhz PC with IDE optical drive and it also had an error in the rip which he had to correct with FixVTS which he didn't get on his old PC.

Looking at the System Log, I see a lot of the following:

An error was detected on device \Device\CdRom0 during a paging operation.

and

The device, \Device\CdRom0, has a bad block.

He has DVDFabPasskey installed, so I wonder if that needs to be shutdown before running these burning apps?

He says the BurnAware Free also told him his disc was too big (i.e. over 80mins), despite the total time shown only being 79-something minutes and that either that program or Ashampoo said there was a problem verifying after the burn, although he was able to use another program to verify (I'm not sure what he used) and that worked fine.

His main HDD is on the separate SATA3 inteface and he has an IDE HDD on that. The optical drive is currently the only device on the SATA2 ports, apart from the lead to the SATA port on the front panel (which doesn't have any devices connected to it).

Edited October 24, 2013 by doveman

[jaclaz]

Looking at the System Log, I see a lot of the following:

An error was detected on device \Device\CdRom0 during a paging operation.

and

The device, \Device\CdRom0, has a bad block.

That tends to be an error (like electrical interference or bad/intermittent contact) in the actual cable/connector (SATA in this case).

As an example, it was typical of ATA66+ IDE hard disk drives on 40 pin cable

I would verify contacts/connector and try replacing the cable, before anything else.

jaclaz

[doveman]

Looking at the System Log, I see a lot of the following:

An error was detected on device \Device\CdRom0 during a paging operation.

and

The device, \Device\CdRom0, has a bad block.

That tends to be an error (like electrical interference or bad/intermittent contact) in the actual cable/connector (SATA in this case).

As an example, it was typical of ATA66+ IDE hard disk drives on 40 pin cable

I would verify contacts/connector and try replacing the cable, before anything else.

jaclaz

OK, thanks.

I did replace the cable once already (in fact all the SATA cables) as the previous one seemed to be problematic but I'm sure I checked the new one and it was OK. I'll get him to check it's connected securely anyway and buy him a new one if it still isn't working properly.

Any ideas about why I can't kill the programs that are hanging though?

[doveman]

We've given up on Burnaware and Ashampoo as they both have stupid bugs that affect burning audio CDs. WMP seems to be quite capable for this task so that's what we're using for now, although I might install Nero as my brother's used to that.

I noticed the following in the System log though

The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk3\DR2 (and DR3)

Googling this (and considering he only has two internal HDDs) it seems this must be his USB stick. Does the "controller error" refer to the USB controller on the motherboard or on the USB stick? If the latter, I guess his stick is just knackered and should be replaced but if the former, it's more concerning.

[doveman]

OK, my brother's replaced the SATA cable to the optical drive now with a higher quality one I got him to buy.

He tells me that the first DVD he burnt after that (not cheap discs, Verbatim) failed to verify and I still see errors in the log like

An error was detected on device \Device\CdRom0 during a paging operation.

although the errors after 28/11 refer to CdRom3 instead, so I presume it just changed the number when he replaced the lead for some reason.

Any suggestions?