AarghVark Control Panel Won't Start

[FlexVibrato]

Hi, Just joined the forum and was hoping for some suggestions on my ArghVark Q10, which I can't get to work.

I took delivery of my Aarvark Q10 the day before Thanksgiving and have spent hours trying to get it to work or find out from this forum why it’s not working. I initially installed the Windows XP drivers from the disk (or tried to, the manual refers to a “setup.exe” file that wasn’t there) then installed the 7.04 XP driver from their website. I’ve installed in every available slot, disabled the Audigy and NIC cards, and the card shows up in Control Panel as working properly with no conflicts but I can’t get the Aardvark Control Panel to initialize. In XP Services it shows the Ark Manager service has stopped, and when I try to manually start it, I get a message that says it started, then stopped right away. I haven’t seen this type of problem on the forum and wonder if anyone has a suggestion.

My mobo/Chipset combination was recommended by a DAW maker when I built this machine, but I see that VIA chipsets can be a problem. I can’t think of anything else from their website that is causing the app not to open. There was a statement on the website that I get the error "an unsupported operation was attempted" that they can send me a fix. Has anyone had this problem or have a copy of the fix file?

Needless to say, I haven’t even tried to record or get sound from this card and I can’t see popping other cards in and out or editing the registry to get this to work. It’s going back to the store if I can’t get this resolved today.

AMD Athlon XP 1900
ASUS A7V266-E
Via KT266A
Crucial 512 DDR RAM
Windows XP Pro
NVidea GeForce 3 TI200 AGP Card
3 60 MB IMB Deskstar HDs, 2 configured as striped array
NIC Card
Sonar XL 2.2
Aardvark 7.04 drivers
SB Audigy
MoBo sound disabled
All known updates installed

I’d appreciate any suggestions. Thanks.

[Boom]

If it were me I would try taking out all other PCI cards, but you mention you don't want to mess with that and I can't really blame you. I think you should take it back and get something else, I don't know how that card will get along with the Via chipset.

[FlexVibrato]

Thanks. I tried taking out all the PCI cards and installing the Q10 in the one slot I hadn't tried, where the Audigy had been, and other than switching to IRQ 9, the change had no effect. The Aardvark Audio Manager still doesn't initiate. I'll give Aardvark tech support a chance to provide me with a fix, but if that doesn't work I'm sending it back and buying the Edirol DA2496. It's a shame, since when it works it sounds like the Q10 is a great sounding card.

[joemix]

It's your RAID setup, Aardvark can't handle it. When are people gonna listen http://www.audioforums.com/forums/confused.gif

Send it back for the DA2496!

[FlexVibrato]

Originally posted by joemix:
It's your RAID setup, Aardvark can't handle it. When are people gonna listen http://www.audioforums.com/forums/confused.gif

Send it back for the DA2496!

You obviously have your opinion on the Aarghvark, and I guess I should have searched the boards more before I purchased, but it's taking me about 4 hours of searching to finally find a post that mentions RAID as a potential problem. (I found it on the Cubase forum after receiving your message)

Although I'm considering sending it back on principle, I may try backing up and reconfiguring without the RAID to see if that's the fix. It's worth a shot since I'm not making any music today.

[joemix]

Originally posted by FlexVibrato:

Although I'm considering sending it back on principle, I may try backing up and reconfiguring without the RAID to see if that's the fix. It's worth a shot since I'm not making any music today.


Don't waste your time. Get the Edirol and concentrate on making music.

[oops]

The motherboard you are using gave me a ton of trouble with my 24/96, and to boot fried a 1900+ cpu. The Ali chipset was cut from the field in the year they made that board. It wasn't overclockable, wouldn't post half the time, and cooked a cpu in short order. Good luck.
You could try the Edirol, but I'm almost positive you will run into trouble again with that chipset. Also its a 266 fsb front end running on pc133(old)memory.
I traded mine for an a7v333, and upped to pc2700 memory at that time, but I'ld suggest you look at Asus A7n8x Deluxe board if its not too late to trade it up. Good luck guy.
MP3com sucks.IMHO

[joemix]

Originally posted by oops:
The motherboard you are using gave me a ton of trouble with my 24/96, and to boot fried a 1900+ cpu.

Probably because of the Aark driver build at that time, which gave everyone a ton of trouble.

Whether you upgrade your motherboard or not, get the Edriol. You will be happier in the long run, especially if you think you might want to upgrade to an external mic pre at some point, as you can't actually bypass the Aark preamps. I won't even go into how much better Edirol's drivers are, should be common knowledge by now.

That said, I think the Edirol will work fine with your existing setup.

[FlexVibrato]

Well, in the process of disabling my RAID controllers I discovered some type of virtual CD Rom drive my video software had installed and disabled that as well and, only 6+ hours of fiddling later, I was finally able to open the Control Panel and test the unit! Haven't had much time to record, but so far it seems to be working fine with Sonar 2.2.

My board was a recommended DAW setup when I bought it and was getting great reviews, but I also fried a CPU during construction (oops, my first AMD machine) and have had to reinstall XP OS about 3 times when the MoBo seems to "lose" one or more of the hard drives then find them and assign the wrong drive letter to them. Maybe the RAID was causing the problems. Anyway, thanks for the suggestions on some newer boards. I'll probably be upgrading within a year.

Crossing my fingers that my major Aardvark problems are behind me . . .

[FlexVibrato]

Here's an update on my experience so far with the Q10. It turns out the conflict was with my Promise IDE controller (even though no RAID configured) which, for some reason, appears as a SCSI device in Device Manager. Since this controls one of the drives I intended to save audio to, it presented a dilemma. I ended up making an audio hardware profile that disabled the Promise controller. When I boot up the Aardvark drivers can initialize. Then I have to go into Device Manager, enable the IDE controller, then into Administrative tools and reactivate the drives controlled by it. This is pretty funky but appears to work.

I haven't decided whether I can live with this setup, but I like the sound and features of the Q10 and I'm a bit worried that any replacement I buy could have the same type of issues. I plan at least to wait to see if Aardvark tech support has any better suggestions.

In addition to the Edirol, I'm also considering the Echo Layla. THe lack of pre-amps wouldn't be a big problem as I have a Mackie 1604 VLZ mixer. (Although I am curious as to how the Q10 pre-amps compare). Although I will do some reseach on this board before I buy, does anyone have any experience with the Layla on sound and driver issues compared to the Q10?

Thanks to all who offered suggestions on my problem.

[Mr. Moon]

Originally posted by FlexVibrato:
...but I also fried a CPU during construction (oops, my first AMD machine) and have had to reinstall XP OS about 3 times when the MoBo seems to "lose" one or more of the hard drives then find them and assign the wrong drive letter to them. Maybe the RAID was causing the problems. Anyway, thanks for the suggestions on some newer boards. I'll probably be upgrading within a year.

Crossing my fingers that my major Aardvark problems are behind me . . .

Welcome to the forum.

IMHO, based on your statement above, you will continue to experience stupid frustrating problems regardless of the soundcard you use, until you get a new mainboard. When you toast a CPU, you never know what else has gone down with it. By the symptoms you're reporting, there's a good chance that you now have a few "gremlins" sneaking around your system that will remain until you purchase a new MB.

If it were me, I'd spend the ~$100.00 on a new ASUS A7N8X from my local vendor than have to deal with the bugs your system seems to have aquired ...but that's just me.

Good luck!

-mr moon

[FlexVibrato]

Originally posted by Mr. Moon:
Welcome to the forum.

IMHO, based on your statement above, you will continue to experience stupid frustrating problems regardless of the soundcard you use, until you get a new mainboard. When you toast a CPU, you never know what else has gone down with it. By the symptoms you're reporting, there's a good chance that you now have a few "gremlins" sneaking around your system that will remain until you purchase a new MB.

If it were me, I'd spend the ~$100.00 on a new ASUS A7N8X from my local vendor than have to deal with the bugs your system seems to have aquired ...but that's just me.

Good luck!

-mr moon




Thanks. That may be the way to go. That looks a nice board but I'd like to find one with 2 IDE controllers so I can use all my existing drives. Any suggestions?

[Mr. Moon]

Originally posted by FlexVibrato:

Thanks. That may be the way to go. That looks a nice board but I'd like to find one with 2 IDE controllers so I can use all my existing drives. Any suggestions?

Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks to me like you have three (3) 60 GB drives (from your original post), which would work fine if you want to run them all on one IDE channel on the A7N8X; 1 slave/master pair on one of the IDE ports and then the other as either a master or slave drive on the other port. (Each IDE channel has 2 ports; 2 drives on each port, for a total of 4 drives in total)

...But, if you want RAID (striping) with this MB, you'd need to purchase a PCI-card to do so. The only RAID cards I've used and had work really well are SCSI backplane cards on some servers. I have used the promise controller raid kludge on one of my older ABIT MB's, but gave up after it got all silly on me.

Food for thought: what do you need striping for? ...Read/write speeds? I have two (2) 80 GB and one (1) 160 GB drives installed on my ASUS A7N8X (AthlonXP 3000+, 1 GB PC3200 DDR memory, Aardvark DP 2496), and the last thing I have to worry about is drive read/write speeds. My biggest problem is finding the "sweet spot" for microphone placement for all my amps ...but that's for another thread. http://www.audioforums.com/forums/smile.gif

Striping will *not* provide you with redundancy in case of drive failure, but I'm sure you already know that. Only RAID 3 (mirroring) and RAID 5 (striping with parity) will provide fault tolerance.

Try contacting Ben Mullins at Aardvark Tech support about your issues, he'll help you out. (I'm assuming he does tech support for both the DP 2496 and the Q10, but if he can't help you, someone there will be able to!)

I would also consider Oops' suggestion on the ASUS A7N8X deluxe; I think that's the one with serial ATA. S'posed to be faster than heck, but as I said before, my system runs fast enough with 30+ tracks of audio that I don't even have to think about read/write speeds using a single IDE channel alone. ...And that's with 3 huge ATA133 drives chugging away.

Good luck!

-mr moon

[FlexVibrato]

Originally posted by Mr. Moon:
Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks to me like you have three (3) 60 GB drives (from your original post), which would work fine if you want to run them all on one IDE channel on the A7N8X; 1 slave/master pair on one of the IDE ports and then the other as either a master or slave drive on the other port. (Each IDE channel has 2 ports; 2 drives on each port, for a total of 4 drives in total)

...But, if you want RAID (striping) with this MB, you'd need to purchase a PCI-card to do so. The only RAID cards I've used and had work really well are SCSI backplane cards on some servers. I have used the promise controller raid kludge on one of my older ABIT MB's, but gave up after it got all silly on me.

Food for thought: what do you need striping for? ...Read/write speeds? I have two (2) 80 GB and one (1) 160 GB drives installed on my ASUS A7N8X (AthlonXP 3000+, 1 GB PC3200 DDR memory, Aardvark DP 2496), and the last thing I have to worry about is drive read/write speeds. My biggest problem is finding the "sweet spot" for microphone placement for all my amps ...but that's for another thread. http://www.audioforums.com/forums/smile.gif

Striping will *not* provide you with redundancy in case of drive failure, but I'm sure you already know that. Only RAID 3 (mirroring) and RAID 5 (striping with parity) will provide fault tolerance.

Try contacting Ben Mullins at Aardvark Tech support about your issues, he'll help you out. (I'm assuming he does tech support for both the DP 2496 and the Q10, but if he can't help you, someone there will be able to!)

I would also consider Oops' suggestion on the ASUS A7N8X deluxe; I think that's the one with serial ATA. S'posed to be faster than heck, but as I said before, my system runs fast enough with 30+ tracks of audio that I don't even have to think about read/write speeds using a single IDE channel alone. ...And that's with 3 huge ATA133 drives chugging away.

Good luck!

-mr moon

[FlexVibrato]

Originally posted by Mr. Moon:
Well, correct me if I'm wrong, but it looks to me like you have three (3) 60 GB drives (from your original post), which would work fine if you want to run them all on one IDE channel on the A7N8X; 1 slave/master pair on one of the IDE ports and then the other as either a master or slave drive on the other port. (Each IDE channel has 2 ports; 2 drives on each port, for a total of 4 drives in total)

...But, if you want RAID (striping) with this MB, you'd need to purchase a PCI-card to do so. The only RAID cards I've used and had work really well are SCSI backplane cards on some servers. I have used the promise controller raid kludge on one of my older ABIT MB's, but gave up after it got all silly on me.

Food for thought: what do you need striping for? ...Read/write speeds? I have two (2) 80 GB and one (1) 160 GB drives installed on my ASUS A7N8X (AthlonXP 3000+, 1 GB PC3200 DDR memory, Aardvark DP 2496), and the last thing I have to worry about is drive read/write speeds. My biggest problem is finding the "sweet spot" for microphone placement for all my amps ...but that's for another thread. http://www.audioforums.com/forums/smile.gif

Striping will *not* provide you with redundancy in case of drive failure, but I'm sure you already know that. Only RAID 3 (mirroring) and RAID 5 (striping with parity) will provide fault tolerance.

Try contacting Ben Mullins at Aardvark Tech support about your issues, he'll help you out. (I'm assuming he does tech support for both the DP 2496 and the Q10, but if he can't help you, someone there will be able to!)

I would also consider Oops' suggestion on the ASUS A7N8X deluxe; I think that's the one with serial ATA. S'posed to be faster than heck, but as I said before, my system runs fast enough with 30+ tracks of audio that I don't even have to think about read/write speeds using a single IDE channel alone. ...And that's with 3 huge ATA133 drives chugging away.

Good luck!

-mr moon

Somehow my last post got lost and just the quote got sent. Thanks. I do have 3 60 MB drives, 2 on the secondary, on-board Promise controller. I took your advice and converted from striped to simple volumes and didn't notice a difference in performance. I forggot to mention I also have a CDRW, DVDRW and a zip drive, all told using 7 of my 8 available drive connections. I know, I shouldn't have all this junk on an audio workstation. http://www.audioforums.com/forums/smile.gif I was looking at the ASUS A7N8X deluxe and noticed the serial ATA drive controller. Does that mean I'd have to get serial drives or could I use my existing drives with a PCI drive controller? I could upgrade the board and get an XP 2500 chip for about $200, not a bad investment if I can keep all my existing hardware.


Thanks again for the suggestions.

[Mr. Moon]

Originally posted by FlexVibrato:
Somehow my last post got lost and just the quote got sent. Thanks. I do have 3 60 MB drives, 2 on the secondary, on-board Promise controller. I took your advice and converted from striped to simple volumes and didn't notice a difference in performance. I forggot to mention I also have a CDRW, DVDRW and a zip drive, all told using 7 of my 8 available drive connections. I know, I shouldn't have all this junk on an audio workstation. http://www.audioforums.com/forums/smile.gif I was looking at the ASUS A7N8X deluxe and noticed the serial ATA drive controller. Does that mean I'd have to get serial drives or could I use my existing drives with a PCI drive controller? I could upgrade the board and get an XP 2500 chip for about $200, not a bad investment if I can keep all my existing hardware.


Thanks again for the suggestions.


No prob... It's good karma to try to help those like I was helped early on.

With the Deluxe version of the A7N8x, it looks like you would have 2 IDE ports and 2 serial ATA ports, so depending on how many drives you require (and it appears that you need quite a few! http://www.audioforums.com/forums/smile.gif), you may have to get a PCI ata133 controller card to use all the drives you currently have. Then, start buying serail ATA drives from that point on, and you'd be fine. The Q10 might not like sharing the PCI bus though.

I would consider possibly building an "audio-only" worksation that has none of the superfluous (I had to work that word in somehow http://www.audioforums.com/forums/smile.gif)peripherals. I mean, heck, if you're getting a new MB and processor anyways, might as well do it right and get a case with a d@mn good power supply (Antec or another AMD-approved brand), some good CAS 2 DDR memory (Corsair is a great brand), etc., and throw together a bare bones workstation. Use your old parts for a gaming/enetrtainment rig like I have done. If your Q10 is anything like my DP 2496, it hates sharing resources with anything else, especially PCI devices!

Anyways, I would suggest you talk to the support people at Aardvark if you would rather just try to nail down the issues with your current setup.

Good luck!

-mr moon

[melloman]

I have a Q10, and I also have a promise card in my machine. I have an 865 chipset P4, and all my audio drives are on the internal IDE, and my CDRW and my removable drive drawer is as well.

I have a good system together, on a 3 gig P4. My neteworking is not on the PCI bus, which helps the Q10. Previously, I had an 850 chipset board that had a networking card in, and it had some slowness with the Q10.