DVD Drive Problem
 

I was recently watching a DVD that I had purchased at the hadji shop when I got to a specific point in a specific episode that caused it to freeze up. My media player crashed, and the computer was slow to respond to my queries whenever I would try to open the DVD back up. It would crash again shortly afterwards. I eventually had to restart my system to get the DVD drive working again. But now everytime I try to watch a DVD or play an audio CD, the audio and video will pause/skip around. As if it were rapidly pausing and resuming. Any idea what happened? I haven't got a clue.

What kind of DVD drive?
What operating system?
What media player?

His DVD probably went back to PIO mode, after failing to read the DVD he bought. Fixing it is a simple matter of deleting the Secondary IDE Channel from Device Manager, and rebooting.

To confirm, please do the following:

Start -> Settings -> Control Panel -> System -> Hardware Tab -> Device Manager -> expand IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers -> double-click Secondary IDE Channel.

Averius, post a screenshot of, or tell us what is contained in, the "Advanced Settings" tab?

HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GSA 4084N, Windows XP Media Center Edition, any and all media players. I'm not quite sure what type of DVD drive that is, but its the factory one that came with my laptop. An HP dv8000.

As far as the advanced settings tab, there wasn't a secondary IDE channel. I checked the primary one, and it said Auto Detection, transfer mode was DMA if available, current transfer mode was PIO. It had a first and second device, both with the same settings.

Delete the primary IDE channel and reboot. Recheck as needed. PIO mode is hellishly slow and tends to freeze up your computer a lot.

Correct

Wrong. If that happens you've got a serious hardware problem. PIO mode should never freeze a system. In fact it is more reliable because you don't depend on the DMA controller.

Thank you, that appears to have fixed the problem. It no longer says PIO. It now says Multi-Word DMA Mode 2.

I disagree. PIO mode results in much higher cpu utilization when in use, and in my book, "freezes" the system :p

Averius: Don't put the DVD that regressed your drive to PIO mode, and you should be fine! Make sure it stays in DMA mode.

Thank you. I'll try to do just that. It's just that here in Iraq, the post that I'm stationed in has only one place to go for DVD's and that would be the Hadji shop. A lot of times I can't even use them on my laptop because of how heavily compressed the DVD's can be. For example, I can't watch some DVD's of Star Trek Voyager because they somehow managed to cram 20 episodes of reasonably high quality onto a single 4.5 GB DVD. They all work fine in my buddy's DVD player though, so I guess I'll have to either buy one of my own, or borrow his. Thanks again.

Well that's because it it programmed IO.

Uhm, you should better say 'slows down', a system freeze is something more severe. In german you would say: 'Das System ruckelt/hakelt' (the system is jerky; I don't seem to find a translation of 'hakelig'; and I don't even know if you can use the jerky term there?)

@Zergrinch: I'm interested - why does Windows revert to PIO? I never experienced something like that (maybe because I'm still using w2k). AFAIK the controller can determine if their is too much cable noise for good transfers. So Windows should know if the read errors were caused by bad cables or were actual (media) read errors.

@Averius: Good luck in Iraq mate. Stay safe.

@LiquidAcid: Jerky, slow, sluggish, unresponsive. I suppose I could use a better synonym than "freeze", but it's just semantics. It's what popped into my head when I wrote it. Oh well, as long as I'm understood by an English speaker :)

Regarding why this happens, it's because that's how Microsoft implemented it. Get 6 consecutive CRC errors, and Windows downgrades it, all the way from Ultra DMA 2 to PIO mode. Read all about it here. Don't think Win2k is immune to this, as WinXP IS based on Windows New Technology architecture!

Mom always said I should go to school to learn about computers, but nooo I had to learn about welding and then join the Army to be an infantry soldier...