I hope someone can help me here. I've really been banging my head against the wall on this one. I recently got a DRU500a drive from sony it's the dvd -+rw the problem is that on files larger than say 10 megs it sits there and just churns. On programs (nero) where i can see what it's doing it's usually stuck on the lead-in write phase. I've upgraded the firmware of my motherboard as suggested and tried to get the f version of the driver firmware upgraded (without success, it just keeps asking me to reboot before installing) so it's stuck on firmware version "e". I would suspect the drive itself however, i've got it RMA'ed (so this is the second one) *and* I tried installing a Cendyne a05 (pioneer-105) and had the same kinda luck. Does anyone out there have any suggestions on what i might try next? I've tried burning on dvd-rw only (as i don't want to making coasters of perfectly good dvd-r, although i have tried 1 dvd-r without luck). I have full formatted the dvd-rw once before usage and numerous times since then, although currently with the new drive it seems to get stuck when trying to do a full format (40+ mins and still not done) but the quickformat seemed to work. Please help. Thanks in advance. Oh yeah machine specs:
Shuttle ss51 PC
2.0a ghz pentium
512 Mushkin basic PC2100 ram
i/o magic PVR
PNY GF4ti4200
Western digital 120 special edition drive

Thanks again

I would suggest to try on other PC the Sony or Cendyne drive to see if it works. Something in your system messes up with those drives i think

(in reply to myty1)

I have a Shuttle SS51 too, and I had the same problem: installed the latest SIS IDE drivers (which also upgrades your IDE controller to UDMA6 (ATA133) instead of UDMA5 (ATA100). This will solve all "lead-in" problems, but will give you another problem in return:
CPU usage when burning cd's and dvd's is always 100%!
Tried all options (turning off DMA, changing IDE channel, master/slave, different media, etc.), no succes....
Please let me know if you succeed in solving your original problem and especially solving the new problem!

(in reply to myty1)