It's been awhile and I should do an update regarding my errors in my Windows Media Player.
There was nothing wrong with my Media player after all LOL!!! My music playlist had become corrupted because that is what it had been given. Let me explain.
The errors just kept getting worse and worse, so I decided to dump everything and re-format my HDD. During my re-installation of Windows XP Pro it was reading errors. So I formatted again and attempted another install. The errors just kept getting worse. I tried 3 different SATA DVD drives, 2 Plextors and an LG SATA drive, all reading errors. Hmmmmm!!
I finally took my computer to Canada Computers where I bought all of my components. They swapped out everything to another computer and my DVD drives were working OK on it. They finally advised me that there had to be a problem with the ICH8R chipset on the MOBO, an ASUS P5B-Deluxe, so I RMA'd the board. ASUS sent me a replacement P5B and I re-installed everything. Everything was working good for about 2 weeks when I started to get errors once again. Looking in the event log it showed that all the errors were from ATAPI device.
So one nite I was looking around the menues in my computer. I was in Device Manager and looked in IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers. Right clicking on that and selecting Properties, then advanced settings, under Device 1 it was on Auto Detection ( but shaded out ). The second line said " DMA if available " which is normal. But the last line under current mode it said " PIO mode. ( thats not normal ). PIO mode is a much slower transfer rate and it should be in DMA mode.
SO now that I knew what the problem was, I Googled it and there seems to be lots of this issue with lots of ppl on different MOBO's with the newer SATA optical drives. The DMA mode seems to be reverting back to PI0 mode when reading errors from sata DVD drives and not reverting back to DMA mode.
SATA optical drives are fairly new. I'm not sure if it a compatability / chipset driver issue. a BIOS issue or what and what the fix is. I'm presently emailing ASUS and also the DVD drive manufacturers to see if a BIOS update is available, or a better chipset driver etc.
Stay tuned
Dougie