Monday 15 December 2008

Slow Read/Write CD/DVD Behaviour

I was having problems with single layer DVD burns taking ~50 minutes on my Dell Vostro, when they should have been taking about 8-9 minutes. After some research, I found the culprit - The IDE interface was in PIO mode rather than Ultra DMA.

Windows XP is set to put an IDE interface into PIO mode after a few timeout errors. This is apparently what happened to me after attempting to read a CD with some significant errors on it.

The easiest way (at least for the standard Intel controller) to clear the PIO mode problem is to go into Device Manager, open up the IDE ATA/ATAPI controller, check which IDE channel is in PIO mode then uninstall it. Then go to the top of the list in Device Manager, right click and select Detect new hardware. A few reboots are also par for the course in Windowsland...

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