Overload on Ext. Hard Drive and Ext. DVD/CD Burner

[Whizbang]

A problem has reared its ugly head with my external IDE hard drive and my external NEC 8X DVD/CD burner.  I cannot copy large amounts of data to either.  Both setups will deactivate very quickly.  Hard drive will accept a few megs of files and then deactivate from USB port.  DVD/CD burner will not even get that far, failing in initial burn immediately following pre-burn setup.  Burn rate is recalculated to 1X; time for burn is displayed as 93 minutes; and then deactivation.  I do not think that any disk burning is done at all.

I tried to use Easy CD 5.5 with full upgrades.  Nero came with the burner, but it did not want to set up right, so I filed it away and went with Roxio that I had onhand.  

Since both drives seem to act the same way, I am thinking a common thread as in USB transmission.  2.0 is what is on the MSI K7N2 Delta.  Latest USB drivers installed.

(later)

I just tried formatting the hard drive with my other system from the 1.0 USB port.  Formatting was 99% finished when error message appeared that Windows could not finish formatting the drive.  Although the idea showed much promise, the USB connections seem to be too slow for proper data transmission.  If anyone has any information on this, please poast.

[Chandler]

I had problems with USB 2.0, it was related to PCI Latency for the USB EHCI controller in my case.  The default value was 0, and increasing it to 32 helped out a lot.

You can manually tweak this with WPCREDIT, available from my web site, and it will be Register 0D which should be set to 40h for whatever Device ID, Funct ID, Bus ID the USB controller is on.  I'll give you more specific instructions if you want to try this.

Also, if you're using Windows XP, there have been updates to the USB 2.0 drivers since SP1 which resolve issues with USB 2.0 hard drives (included in the USB Update Rollup package)

As for DVD writing, can you write to CD-R, CD-RW and DVD+R but not DVD-R.  I had this problem with a USB connected DVD writer and I'm beginning to think that it's a problem with the drivers provided with Windows.

I'll probably be able to give better assistance in the morning, it's nearly 1am here now.  ::)

[Whizbang]

Thanks Chandler.  Until then, I am going to shelve it.  I really do not need more headaches to deal with.  The concept is still appealing, but I do not want to crash my systems trying to find the carrot that will make the "wabbit"  "wun."  :P