DVDFab: Will not open DVD Drives

[FKloskowski]

I am having a problem with DVDFab opening both of my Plextor DVD drives (all DVDs).

Here are the details:

• Brand new system with a new install of Windows 7 64 bit
• Motherboard: ASUS P6T DELUXE V2 1366
• CPU: Intel Core I7 950 3.06G
• BluRay Writer: LG BluRay Rewriter WH08LS20 SATA off ICH10 Family 6 port SATA AHCI Controller
• DVD Drives: Two Plextor PX716A DVD Writers on Marvell 61xx RAID EIDE Controller
• Latest version of DVDFab (v6.2.0.5)

Problem Description:

Both Plextor drives are unable to open any DVDs in DVDFab. The drives spin but the progress bar never comes up. The drives are visible in Windows Explorer and I can use PowerDVD to play DVDs in both drives. If I point DVDFab to the either one of the DVD drives it starts to read the drive but immediately the progress bar disappears.

DVDs are immediately opened with the BluRay drive but when ripping the speed is painfully slow (3MB a Sec) for all DVDs I have tried.
The Plextor DVD drives worked great with DVDFab in the Windows XP system they came from. I also tried with PathPlayer and without and there was no difference. Four different DVDs tried same symptoms. The symptoms have always been present (brand new PC).

I took the drives out and checked that they were jumpered correctly (EIDE one master the other slave). They were but I then set the jumpers to both Cable Select. This did not result in any change.

I thought I would post here before posting to support to see if anyone has an idea on what could be causing this strange problem with a brand new system.

[GregiBoy]

Humour me here.... I'm trying to track some of the Win 7 problems down..

When you start Fab, right-click on the icon and then "Run As Administrator" and see if there's any difference and let us know the results.

[bean55]

Are you getting the UAC pop up window ?

Any error messages ?

[signals]

DVDFab normally uses SPTI to access the drives. Anything that interferes with that will cause the sypmtoms you mention. You can try forcing DVDFab to use ASPI (in Common Settings->Read) as a workaround, but I have no idea if Win7 comes with the driver.

[maineman]

Could you give us some details as to how your system is set up?

For eg.,
Did you load the AHCI drivers during the Win7 install?
From the Asus support disc?
How are your PATA drives configured in your bios?

[FKloskowski]

Sorry I have not gotten back to this thread as I am an impatient one and after posting this I went on all out quest to find and resolve the problem. It was not a DVDFab issue at all.

I did additional testing and I was able to determine that the read functionality was sporadic with these two DVD drives using other applications and Windows Explorer.

I then tried to use boot disks on the two drives (this taking the OS out of the mix) and again the read access was sporadic. This led me to believe the problem had to be the IDE controller on the motherboard (Marvell 88SE6111). I found some references to others having problems with this controller but after hours and hours of searching I could not find much in the way of resolution to the problems few references I found .

Since DVD drives are so cheap I decided to go out and by two new SATA Plextor drives and thus avoid using the IDE controller. I had no issues at all after making this change.