Recurring Issue With Multiple Pioneer Drives

[Jimmy_Tightlips]

Hi everyone, I was hoping if I could get some help with an issue I've been having with Pioneer drives in my PC. This isn't explicitly makemkv related, but I thought if anywhere is gonna have the knowledge and expertise to help - it'd probably be here:

Basically, CD Playback / Reading is completely broken with crackles, pops and skips and any rip I make will suffer from this; using a tool like Imgburn to compare a disc with an exact image file will also throw a massive amount of read errors, and EAC will report that all tracks ripped from a CD are inaccurate.

When I noticed this, I assumed that the CD laser of my drive (Pioneer BDR-S09) was on the way out, so I decided to splash out on a BDR-S13J-X to replace it. To my horror though, once I installed it in my computer...it was behaving in the exact same way.

I have an old Samsung DVD Drive which I've since tested in this PC and it works perfectly, as does an external LG drive. I originally noticed this behaviour of my BDR-S09 after I'd finished building a new Ryzen based system about 6 months ago, but as I didn't test the drive right away it never ocurred to me that the PC itself may be the cause of this problem. All I know is that prior to building this computer my BDR-S09 worked flawlessly in my old Haswell system - so there's obviously something which my PC doesn't like about Pioneer drives or vice versa.

I've tried absolutely everything I can think of, a new SATA cable, disabled TPM, tested it on an ancient version of Windows 10, disabled secure boot, updated chipset drivers etc. and nothing has worked.

All I can think of is that there's some form of incompatibility between the Drives and my Motherboard (whether that be the Motherboard itself, Chipset, SATA Controller, CPU) as I'm struggling to think of any other explanation for this. The only ideas I have left are to try the drives in an external enclosure (i.e. the enclosure itself can handle the SATA commands and convert the data into a USB signal - hopefully circumventing any potential compatibility issues), install the drives back into my old Haswell system (which I gave to a friend, so I don't have it on hand at the moment) to verify that they both work - and finally, I can try an old LG BD/HD-DVD Drive inside my PC to see if that at least works (again, this is with my friend at the moment). I also don't own an enclosure, and ideally I'd prefer not to buy one as they tend to be quite expensive and there's no guarantee it'll even work.

I'm just wondering whether anyone else has encountered, or even heard, of anything like this happening in the past. It's just so bizarre, and it's not something I'd ever considered could even be a possibility. Regardless, I'll keep this thread updated with my findings just in case it can help someone else in the future.

Thanks in advance.

[Billycar11]

i just tried some cds on an 13ubk and they work fine no issues so i can confirm this is not an issue with pioneer drives
this would also go for the s13jx/ux as they are the same drive platform.
it is extremely unlikely the pioneers are at fault here as you say it worked on your old pc no issue.

[dcoke22]

Doesn't Pioneer have a drive utility that enables various 'modes' their optical drives support? I wonder if the drive is in a weird mode.

[Jimmy_Tightlips]

Doesn't Pioneer have a drive utility that enables various 'modes' their optical drives support? I wonder if the drive is in a weird mode.

Yeah I've tried enabling / disabling every single setting in that utility - I did have an idea that maybe the PureRead functionality was causing this to happen but disabling it doesn't make a difference. I've just ripped a Blu-Ray using MakeMKV and it worked perfectly. I've also burned some data to a BD-RE and a DVD+RW - it seems that has worked too, and the discs pass verification.

It just seems to be reading CD's which is the issue. Oddly enough, I burned a PS1 game to a CD-R and it's fine. If I verify the disc using my external DVD drive I only get 1 miscompare (which, as far as I know, is fairly normal for PS1 games) - which matches up with another copy of the same game I burned using the Samsung DVD Drive I referenced in my initial post.

However, if I verify the same discs using the Pioneer drive it registers multiple thousand miscompares every few seconds which is obviously wrong.

[Jimmy_Tightlips]

i just tried some cds on an 13ubk and they work fine no issues so i can confirm this is not an issue with pioneer drives
this would also go for the s13jx/ux as they are the same drive platform.
it is extremely unlikely the pioneers are at fault here as you say it worked on your old pc no issue.

I agree, the drives themselves I'd say with 99.9% confidence are both perfectly fine - and I do hope to verify this is case as soon as I can get access to my old PC again.

Assuming the cause is my new PC (which it probably is) what I'd like to get to the bottom of is why it's happening, as it could be something with the PC itself or it could be the firmware / controller on the drives themselves which don't like my PC for whatever reason (i.e. maybe there's a bug in Pioneer's firmware which causes this to happen under very specific hardware combinations that my PC meets)

[Billycar11]

I agree, the drives themselves I'd say with 99.9% confidence are both perfectly fine - and I do hope to verify this is case as soon as I can get access to my old PC again.

Assuming the cause is my new PC (which it probably is) what I'd like to get to the bottom of is why it's happening, as it could be something with the PC itself or it could be the firmware / controller on the drives themselves which don't like my PC for whatever reason (i.e. maybe there's a bug in Pioneer's firmware which causes this to happen under very specific hardware combinations that my PC meets)

i would get the $20 usb adapter to test first before putting in in the other pc again https://www.amazon.com/Vantec-CB-ST00U3 ... C70&sr=8-1

[Coopervid]

Switch the SATA port to which the drive is connected. Mostly chips that support the higher numbers SATA ports cause some issues. So if it's connected to port 6, connect it to port 2 or 3. If that doesn't work do it just the other way. Then the AMD ports have some issues. If all ports are only provided by the AMD chipset then the above procedure will not help.

[Billycar11]

Yeah amd chipset sata ports are bad I can't tell you how many time like 5 mins after a flash their PC would blue screen and they would say I broke their PC because they didn't follow instructions and turn off for a min with my automated flasher lol

[Jimmy_Tightlips]

Yeah amd chipset sata ports are bad I can't tell you how many time like 5 mins after a flash their PC would blue screen and they would say I broke their PC because they didn't follow instructions and turn off for a min with my automated flasher lol

Switch the SATA port to which the drive is connected. Mostly chips that support the higher numbers SATA ports cause some issues. So if it's connected to port 6, connect it to port 2 or 3. If that doesn't work do it just the other way. Then the AMD ports have some issues. If all ports are only provided by the AMD chipset then the above procedure will not help.

I've tried connecting it to different ports, and the behaviour persists. My motherboard only has 4 SATA ports so they're all very likely provided by the AMD Chipset anyway - it's seeming as though the chipset is probably to blame for this.

Does anyone know of any diagnostic software I can use to log the Drive's commands? As that may be able to shine some light on what's going on.

Thanks for all your help so far

[Coopervid]

Read this:

viewtopic.php?f=19&t=27378&p=119602&hil ... in#p119602

[Jimmy_Tightlips]

Read this:

viewtopic.php?f=19&t=27378&p=119602&hil ... in#p119602

This gives some more evidence that the chipset / SATA controller is to blame, though the symptoms of their issue doesn't exactly match mine. My system is also configured as AHCI not RAID, and the fix they suggested later on ("enabling S.M.A.R.T option for SATA Controller in UEFI BIOS") isn't available for MSI Motherboards unfortunately.

[Coopervid]

Try that:

https://www.amd.com/de/support/kb/faq/pa-250

[Jimmy_Tightlips]

Try that:

https://www.amd.com/de/support/kb/faq/pa-250

Looks like it's already using the correct SATA Controller Drivers that AMD recommend. I'm beginning to think there might not be a way to fix this without circumventing the SATA Controller. I've considered hacking together something to convert the drive from SATA to USB internally, though it'd probably be easier to just get a new LG Drive if the old one I have ends up working in this PC.

[Coopervid]

You should use the Microsoft drivers, not the AMD drivers. I don't know how you misunderstood that.....

[Billycar11]

Looks like it's already using the correct SATA Controller Drivers that AMD recommend. I'm beginning to think there might not be a way to fix this without circumventing the SATA Controller. I've considered hacking together something to convert the drive from SATA to USB internally, though it'd probably be easier to just get a new LG Drive if the old one I have ends up working in this PC.

Trust me you don't want an LG for UHD ripping the pioneers are way better I'm thinking about stopping selling the lgs