Pioneer DVD-RW compatibility problem with Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe Motherboard
I’ve found that my Pioneer SATA DVR-216 DVD burner has been doing strange things under Vista. It would make ‘ker-chunk’ noises, like a 3.5″ floppy would do and would hardly respond. iTunes would not start properly unless the tray was ejected and most burning software would fail to burn a disc properly. The same software worked fine with a Pioneer DVR-A12 (PATA) in an external Firewire caddy, so I didn’t think it was a software install.
The Asus M3A32-MVP has four internal SATA ports driven by the SB600 chipset and two internal SATA ports driven by a Marvell 6121 SATA RAID controller. The SB600 SATA controller was set in AHCI to support hot-swapping with eSATA ports.
Changing the SB600 settings back to ‘IDE’ has fixed all apparent problems with DVD burning with the internal drive. A bit of a search on the internet has found a fault page at Microsoft. This specifically lists burning problems under XP (rather than Vista) when using a burner on a SB450 or SB600 based SATA controller. There is a hotfix that replaces ATAPI.SYS, so this problem looks to be independent of Pioneer. Comments on Whirlpool suggest that running a burner on a SATA port with AHCI enabled is often bad, and with the SB600 is usually bad. You’ve been warned!
There are apparently problems moving from IDE to ACHI, with blue screens of death and so forth. I can’t quite remember how I got it all to work, but it does. There haven’t been any problems moving from ACHI to IDE on my computer. I did play with using the Marvell 61xx RAID SATA controller, and it was partially successful but the DVD-RW just disappeared now and again and the boot process was delayed quite a long time if there was a disc left in the optical drive.
