I have a Pioneer A04 with a USB 2.0 external enclosure for it, a Dell Inspiron 4100 laptop with a Toshiba DVD/CD-RW drive, and a USB 2.0 PCMCIA card. I am using Ritek media.

When I try to burn games with Nero as straight DVD copies, with the pioneer drive attached to the USB 2.0 port, the software freezes and never starts to write to the disk. It remains a 0%, but the disc is useless since a session on it was started. When I attach the drive to the laptops built in USB 1.1 port, everything works fine.

Does anyone have any ideas/solutions to what is going on? I would greatly appreciate any help in this. I have made 3 coasters so far and would like the advantage of burning at the speeds USB 2.0 provides.

Thanks
SASWDW

you should always burn at 1x for copies anyway, dont see an advantage

Yes 1x is the best speed to burn at. I know that there is a huge difference between USB 1.1 (12mbps max transfrer rate) and USB 2.0 (up to 480mbps). What brand of USB 2.0 pci card are you using? When I put in my Belkin 2.0 USB card in my PC (true it's a desktop and not a laptop) It wouldn't auto install an I had to manually configure the card. Have you tried running any other device through the USB 2.0 card?

I have a Belkin USB hub attached to the 1.1 port and tested it on the USB 2.0 port, and everything on the hub worked fine (mouse, zip drive, printer, etc). The card is made by "Mentor" and says USB 2.0 card bus on it. I think it is working fine, but how do I manually configure it? Is that what is causing Nero to crash? or should I try different software (i.e RecordNowMAxx)?

A friend of mine thinks the USB 2.0 speed is to fast for the rest of the components in my computer to handle. Any truth in this? The laptop is a P3 900 with 30GB hard drive.

Thanks for the help so far,
SASWDW

I have "Copy on the Fly" checked in Nero, could this be the problem?

I have also tried attaching the Pioneer drive to the Belkin USB hub, and then attaching the hub to the USB 2.0 port. I have burned CD's without any problem in this configuration, so I think the USB 2.0 card is working fine. Any ideas on why Nero freezes when the drive is attached directly to the USB 2.0 hub?

Thanks
SASWDW

I would think the burning speeds would be the bottleneck, not USB 1.1. Anyway, what happened when you tried RNM?? I'm gonna go ahead and assume it worked fine.

Recordnow Max is generally considered the better of the two programs. If you are burning on the Fly then that is definitely your problem. On the fly isn't what you should be using if you are transferring from the HD to DVD-R as on the fly burning is designed to read DVD rom to DVD-R. Are you backing up originals or are you just making a backup of a backup?

I am making a backup of the original from the Laptop Toshiba DVD drive to the USB pioneer drive.
I will try RecordNowMaxx and post the results.


SASWDW