Page 1 of Pioneer 105 upgrade. Help Please

I`ve had the Pioneer DVR-A05 drive in my computer for 5 months, & I was told to upgrade to make 1 hour DVDs burn at 2X. I used firmware 1.30. This enabled me to make it burn 1X discs at 2X speed. Now for some while I`ve had various 4X media & it has never burned at 4X, it only burns them at 2X. When I phoned the dealers I was told that not all makes of 4X will burn at 4X, however I have now tried 5 different makes of 4Xs discs & still have never burnt at more than 2X. Further to this my 2X re-writable discs only burn once then won`t erase. Nero 6 won`t acknowlege that there is a disc in the drive. Prassy Primo does & erase`s them but they won`t re-record. 1X R/W are ok but all the 2X R/W have the same problem. Can anybody help with the neccessary upgrade & possably the site. I have looked on DVD-R Help but it`s a minefield. Or, do I have a faulty drive?

AFAIN your drive won`t burn at 4x no matter what Firmware upgrade you have, You will need to get a 106 if you want to burn at 4x.

Thanks for your reply `Ady P` but the Pioneer 105 was always a 4X burner, check out this site. http://www.usb-ware.com/pioneer-dvr-105.htm. The main difference between the 105 & the 106 was on the latter it also burnt + media as well as -. I have to say I have been happy enough with 2X recording but it its annoying to pay for 4X & it does not work, at first I accepted the fact it won`t burn on some but ALL 4 X I have used won`t work is now going too far. Also the fact I can`t use 2 times RW is very annoying, again I blamed the discs but now I have used two other types & they are the same, it burns the first time then don`t want to know. Looking back I bought the writer from SVP at £180-00, two weeks later the 106 came out at a cheaper price. I don`t believe no one knew about the new one or the price. Then only after about 6 weeks the 106 was down to £120-00.

I upgraded the firmware on my Pioneer 105 DVD-R drive and it burns at 4x as well as converting it to a RPC1 drive. The firmware link I used was found on www.lynxdv.com who supplied my drive. It is a modified version of the official Pioneer firmware hence the ability to burn all 4x media at that speed.

Have you tried either upgrading the firmware to 1.33 or downgrading to 1.21. The only problems I can recall with writing @4x is either to do with the drive being reset to PIO mode (it has to be in UDMA mode to write @ 4 speed) or the other problem was to do with the burning software and the recommendation is to uninstall & reinstall the software.

The RW problem is a different matter and it is a known problem with AFAIK no solution - having said that maybe a downgrade/upgrade may sort it out.