Problem with CDRW drive and Promise onboard controller

[norberto]

Hi,

I have an MSI 845PE Max2 FIR motherboard. This motherboard has a Promise 20276 controller.

I flashed my motherboard BIOS with the modified 1.2 BIOS in order to use the Promise controller as a pure UDMA controller. I also installed the latest (non-beta) drivers on Windows Xp (Professional with SP1).

I have a TEAC W540E CDRW burner. As I prefer to have my (three) hard drives connected to the Intel IDE controller, I decided to connect both my DVD reader and my CDRW drive to the IDE3 and IDE4 connectors.

Both drives work properly when reading CD's/DVD's, but when I try to burn a CD with Nero (5.5.x) the drive buffer doesn't stay full for long (95-99%) and it starts decreasing its capacity until it gets to 0%.
When I have BurnProof activated the CD can be burned, although I guess with many burnproof links. If I disable BurnProof, I get a buffer underrun as soon as the drive's buffer is empty.

I don't know if installing the beta drivers for the Promise controller could solve the problem, but before doing that I would like to know if anyone else tried to use a 20276 controller with a CD burner with success.


Can anyone help me out on this matter?

Best regards,

Norberto Henriques


PS: the CD burner works fine if connected to the Intel IDE controller.

PS2: does anyone know how can I setup the UDMA mode for the channels on the Promise controller?

[ric65041]

IDE 3 & IDE 4 are best reserved for HDD and not other optical storage devices such as CD-RW and CD-ROM or DVD-ROM

These devices are normally connected to either IDE 2 or with a HDD on IDE 1 for best function.

[norberto]

Hi,

I was thinking of having all my hard drives on the Intel IDE controller because I trust it the most. Unfortunatelly I still wasn't able to solve my problem with the CD writer (although when it comes to reads, all works fine), so I decided to go for this setup:

IDE0 (intel): HD1 + HD2
IDE1 (intel): CD Writer
IDE2 (Promise): HD3
IDE3 (Promise): DVD ROM

I decided to put my WD1200BB on the Promise, as this hd isn't suppose to handle that much critical data, so if anything goes wrong with the Promise controller, there will not be much of a loss.


Best regards,

Norberto Henriques

[norberto]

oops, double post...