problems with new 250GB firewire drive...

[mtar]

Hello,
I run Samp 7.23 on an XP SP1 system. I have never had any problems with my system, it is very stable. I just purchased and added a 250 gig firewire drive (in a Granite Digital Case) for backups. It installed fine, and it everything was great.

The problem I am having is that when I try to play certain projects in Samp off of the hard drive the computer totally freezes up. I can't even shut it down or restart it without turning off the puter. I don't think it's a samplitude problem though because it locked up when I tried playing a wav file in the Windows Media player, although this time I could quit out of the media player and keep working.

Has anyone had similar problems? Any ideas?
thanks a lot,
mike bridavsky

[TimOBrien]

If you are having problems with a new device (toaster, microwave, vcr, ANYTHING), don't sit there trying to make it work. RETURN IT. Get another one while it's still under warranty....

[mtar]

Originally posted by TimOBrien
If you are having problems with a new device (toaster, microwave, vcr, ANYTHING), don't sit there trying to make it work. RETURN IT. Get another one while it's still under warranty....

OK, thanks... but Im not sure the problem is necessarily with the hard drive or the enclosure which is why I posted this question. I am wondering if other people have had similar problems and found out that it was an OS issue, or max capaxity issue, or a driver issue, or something else entirely. I like to try to understand and solve the problem rather than waste a bunch of money on shipping only to have the same problem occur again.

mike

[jmail]

That firewire hard drive uses an IRQ in order to access the PCI bus. Your audio card uses an IRQ in order to access the PCI bus. Etc., etc., etc.

What happened to me, when I first installed my EMU 1820M, the firewire port on it was assigned the same IRQ as the interface itself, which was the same as the NIC, etc. You get the picture. For some reason, my Win2K did NOT like it when audio and firewire HD activity were happening at the same time. Then you throw in the NIC activity and I was ignorantly crashing everytime I breathed. Drove me nutz! What I've ended up having to do is re-install Win2K as a "Standard PC" and eliminate the ACPI. I also had to experiment with the PCI slots on my motherboard and found that the #3 slot doesn't share an IRQ with anything (except the onboard audio, which is disabled in the BIOS). Once I did that, the firewire got IRQ 5, the NIC is on 9 and the EMU is on 10, all by themselves, and all playing together as all peripherals should. But, man, what a headache. I've now got a computer completely dedicated to audio workstation tasks (not my original intentions when I started on this road)...

[mtar]

Originally posted by jmail
That firewire hard drive uses an IRQ in order to access the PCI bus. Your audio card uses an IRQ in order to access the PCI bus. Etc., etc., etc.

What happened to me, when I first installed my EMU 1820M, the firewire port on it was assigned the same IRQ as the interface itself, which was the same as the NIC, etc. You get the picture. For some reason, my Win2K did NOT like it when audio and firewire HD activity were happening at the same time. Then you throw in the NIC activity and I was ignorantly crashing everytime I breathed. Drove me nutz! What I've ended up having to do is re-install Win2K as a "Standard PC" and eliminate the ACPI. I also had to experiment with the PCI slots on my motherboard and found that the #3 slot doesn't share an IRQ with anything (except the onboard audio, which is disabled in the BIOS). Once I did that, the firewire got IRQ 5, the NIC is on 9 and the EMU is on 10, all by themselves, and all playing together as all peripherals should. But, man, what a headache. I've now got a computer completely dedicated to audio workstation tasks (not my original intentions when I started on this road)...

Thanks, now we're getting somewhere!

So before I go re-installeing XP (which I will be doing at some point int he near future), can I solve my problem by tring my MOTU PCI-424 card in differenent slots? Is there somewhere that tells me which IRQs I should use/are open?

thanks again.

btw, the only card I have plugged into a PCI slot is my audio card.

mike

[howie15]

Mike,

Another thing I found out not too long ago about hard drives is to make sure the firmware in the case is up to date. I never even thought of it, but go on the website of the drive manufacturer (WD, seagate, maxtor, etc.) and do a search for firmware updates. Like I said, I didn't even know that was an issue until somebody told me about it.

Howie J

[jmail]

mtar, the slot you put your MOTU in depends on your motherboard. You'll have to find out if the owner's manual tells you anything, or if the manufacturer's website does. I found a web site message board that "catered" to my board, and someone had done some experimenting on there (must of took lots of time) and had it down what PCI slot shared which IRQs with other slots & onboard gear.

As for the IRQs in use now, right click on my computer, left click Properties, Hardware, Device Manager, View, then choose By Connection (I think) (there's like 4 choices)(I'm not at my Win2K box, which is very similar). Click the plus sign next to IRQ. If your computer is setup as an ACPI computer (most likely), WinXP will assign stuff to up to 24 IRQs, with a bunch of stuff most likely on IRQ 5 (at least, mine was). I can't re-assign interrupts in Win2k, but you might be able to in XP. Perhaps someone else could help there.

[mtar]

thanks,
I was able to find which IRQ each device was working on within System>hardware. While the firewire port and all of the PCI slot do not share the same IRQ, they do share the same PCI bus. Do you think that's what might be causeing the problem?

thanks again.,
mtar

[jmail]

Do you mean the PCI controller or "steering"? That could cause a problem. In theory, the Windows method of IRQ sharing works fine, so long as you don't do anything "intensive", like multi-channel audio or perhaps video editing. The problem you're having is likely a combination of factors. In addition to IRQ sharing, there might be a device (video card?) that is a PCI bandwidth hog. There are a few programs out there to adjust the individual devices' share of the bandwidth. I had a link to a freeware one somewhere... just can't seem to find it. Double Dawg is one that SOS wrote about:

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/Oct04/articles/pcnotes.htm

might be worth the effort.