uncle_bent
12-18-2000, 03:45 PM
I have been having a horrendous time with buffer underruns attempting to burn a CD with about 5100 files on it. I found a solution and would like to post it to possibly save someone else some aggravation and for any possible advice anyone might have on other ways to do it.
I've been trying to burn images from a slide collection and other various images for backup purposes. I have over 5000 files, many of them jpegs that are relatively small. I tried several suggestions I read on the Adaptec (now Roxio) site, including shutting down all other tasks, virus software, etc.., turning off screen saver and power features, changing hard drive settings in windows, burning at 1x, unchecking the "Data track only" box in the CD layout, firmware updates, software patches, and even thought about taking the thing to a chiropractor to relieve "subluxations". After about 10 coasters I found an answer that worked.
I have the pictures categorized in 15 different folders. I created a temp folder on my other drive and created 15 empty folders in it identical to the original folders. I set explorer to view files in name order (the order I wanted them to go onto the CD) and went to each of the old folders alphabetically and did a "select all", then copied them into the temp folder. This way all the files were copied in name order onto the hard drive in one great big contiguous block. When I copied the files from their new location they went down beautifully, no problems at all. Apparently this many small files requires the drive to jump around the disk so much that it cannot keep the buffer on the CD writer supplied with data. It isn't an elegant fix but it works. I suspect that other people with buffer underrun problems are experiencing a similar phenomenon when copying large numbers of small files to disk. Anyone with thoughts on this?
BTW, if you attempt to do this you don't want to simply copy a whole folder at a time because Windows will copy the files in that folder in the order in which they were added to the folder, not in the order they appear in your file list. This would negate much of the advantage of copying the files to another place.
I've been trying to burn images from a slide collection and other various images for backup purposes. I have over 5000 files, many of them jpegs that are relatively small. I tried several suggestions I read on the Adaptec (now Roxio) site, including shutting down all other tasks, virus software, etc.., turning off screen saver and power features, changing hard drive settings in windows, burning at 1x, unchecking the "Data track only" box in the CD layout, firmware updates, software patches, and even thought about taking the thing to a chiropractor to relieve "subluxations". After about 10 coasters I found an answer that worked.
I have the pictures categorized in 15 different folders. I created a temp folder on my other drive and created 15 empty folders in it identical to the original folders. I set explorer to view files in name order (the order I wanted them to go onto the CD) and went to each of the old folders alphabetically and did a "select all", then copied them into the temp folder. This way all the files were copied in name order onto the hard drive in one great big contiguous block. When I copied the files from their new location they went down beautifully, no problems at all. Apparently this many small files requires the drive to jump around the disk so much that it cannot keep the buffer on the CD writer supplied with data. It isn't an elegant fix but it works. I suspect that other people with buffer underrun problems are experiencing a similar phenomenon when copying large numbers of small files to disk. Anyone with thoughts on this?
BTW, if you attempt to do this you don't want to simply copy a whole folder at a time because Windows will copy the files in that folder in the order in which they were added to the folder, not in the order they appear in your file list. This would negate much of the advantage of copying the files to another place.