First off, I'd like to thank the owner of this site and all the helpful people who have posted in the forum. I just built my new rig and I couldn't believe how smoothly it went. However, nothing ever goes perfectly of course, and I am having DVD-ROM problems. When installing programs from CD's, the process takes at least 3 to 4 times as long as my old machine (just installed FreeSpace 2, took a half an hour!) I know its not my HD, bootup and loading off that puppy is extremely fast.-the drive is jumpered as a master drive
-it is connected to the secondary IDE channel
-shares IDE channel with Zip drive, but problem existed before zip drive was installed
-tried two different cables, same problem
-drive does not appear as 'secondary master' in 'Standard CMOS Features' in BIOS Setup (probably not important, looks like that is for fixed disks only)
-drive is properly recognized at bootup as Secondary Master IDE Drive
-Audio CD's play properly, Data CD's do not produce errors
Did some troubleshooting, here is the process and results (restarted after all changes):
1. DMA box in device manager initially unchecked, checked DMA box.
Result: Installation of Midtown Madness 2 crashed on two attempts
2. Unchecked DMA box, installed firmware upgrade (for UDMA), checked DMA box again
Result: Even slower, so slow I was too impatient to see if it would crash, cancelled installation at 14%
3. Installed driver from Samsung website (I believe this is the same driver that was already installed but tried it anyway)
Result: No change, still extremely slow, cancelled installation well before finished
4. Unchecked DMA
Result: Back to original slow speed, but faster than the extremely slow speed with box checked
If any body could help I would greatly appreciate it. Also, any advice on freeware benchmarking programs for optical drives?
Thanks in advance.
PC Specs:
Samsung DVD-ROM SD-612
MSI K7T Turbo MB, non-RAID version (support for UDMA)
Athlon 900MHz
256 MB PC133 RAM
