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G'day John, mate, this added information suggests to me that you may have a HDD on the way out. If you were one of my customers I'd advise allowing us to clone the drive and then run some diagnostics on it. Depending on the drive manufacturer and the diagnostic tools they supply you should be able to run non-destructive tests on the drive, but given that I reckon it's suspect I'd clone it first in case the tests finish it off. At the very least you should be able to interrogate the "SMART" database and see if the drive has actually overheated and you may be able to determine if the drive is running out of spare sectors to reallocate. Drives aren't that expensive. I'd suggest a Seagate 340GB or there abouts (I'm running a 500GB in my HP) and clone the Toshi's drive onto it. We use a separate machine for our cloning efforts - especially for notebooks as it is less easy when you don't have the I/O for a second drive...  If you don't have these facilities available I'd expect your local, trusted computer shop should be able to help for a modest fee. It really only takes about 15 minutes of actual labour to do though the actual cloning process could take an hour or so, and they may do it for free if you buy the new drive from them.
--=-- My credo: If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing - just ask my missus, she'll tell ya  --=--You're only paranoid if you're wrong!
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The age of that lappy would very likely mean that any internal drive choice would have to be IDE type and not SATA.
Be careful when shopping, the larger capacity drives all seem to be of SATA type.
Good news is that the IDE interface laptop drives, while being typically smaller in capacity, are also available at many sources at lower prices these days. But such is often not the case at retailers and large outlet stores, where the supply and demand side must kick in or something, causing them to price the IDE drives higher than I can get them at certain online sources. So shop around.
***Many earlier laptops shipped with less-than-wonderful-for-audio-work hard drives in them in the first place. 5400rpm w/only a 2mb buffer is one of the most often encountered, also, depending on the age of the laptop, it may even be a 4200rpm drive in there, which is less than borderline and certainly not optimum.
***Many are tempted by the laptop replacement 7200rpm drives out there. Do your homework. Cooling is a big issue. Lots of reports of failures due to this problem. The 5400rpm drive that has an 8mb or larger buffer will do the job just about as well and like as not won't suffer from the heatstroke that many 7200rpm laptop installations report.
--Mac
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I just installed this drive in January. Should be under Warrant. WD
Got to take the wife for her daily outing. Shall return.
This 160G is the only IDE drive I could find at Best Buy. I was on vacation at the time. I'll order a new one and get this one replaced under warranty.
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You can also buy direct from WD at very competitive prices, though you may have to dig some to find them. I recently bought a 500 Gb 7,200 RPM IDE drive with a 32 Mb buffer for my DAW for $63 complete--shipping and all. That was partly due to my already owning another WD drive. Micro Center has the best stock and most competitive pricing of IDE drives (now sometimes called PATA drives) on the open market of which I am aware. R.
Last edited by Ryszard; 08/26/09 06:53 AM.
"My primary musical instrument is the personal computer."
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Richard Thanks,
Was that a 2.5 drive or 3.5 ?
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RHARV,
Yes the less tracks the better
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RealBand
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Quote:
Richard Thanks,
Was that a 2.5 drive or 3.5 ?
Mine were 3.5s but both WD and Micro Center have similar deals on 2.5" IDE/PATA drives.
R.
"My primary musical instrument is the personal computer."
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RealBand
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There are 9- 2.5 PATA drives on the planet. All 5400RPM 8meg cache. 160/320 WD & Seagate. I'll probably go Seagate this time as they were good in the past with warranty.
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Well I ran the SMART test from WD and it passed.
If I load the song from the E drive, combine some tracks so I only have 8, bring the zoom down , it looks OK.
Now for the rest of the story.
If I load the same 12 tracks into Sonar, set the zoom resolution the same, the disc load is 11% vs 48% & the CPU is 1% vs15%.
The scroll line is very smooth and the meters react like meters should
Not complaining just observing.
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RealBand
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G'day John,
my suggestion the the drive may be on its way out is based on the temps and startup problems you mentioned more than the load and performance issues.
However, if the SMART reports are clean this casts some doubt on the diagnosis - not that SMART hasn't failed to report problems in the past.
So, before you spend possible unnecessary money, just what startup problems are you experiencing? IE do you get partway into the Windows startup or do you not get past the POST?
OR, if you would like more capacity then a new drive is the answer anyhow...
--=-- My credo: If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing - just ask my missus, she'll tell ya --=--You're only paranoid if you're wrong!
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Twice I didn't get past the post. I'm just going to wait and see. My tests with Sonar tell me that my lappy is on the cusp of being inadequate. Sonar is less of a resource user & keeps me below the line and RB puts me above. At least I'm not still using the PII 400
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RealBand
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Hmm, OK. Either there is a problem on the M/B or the drive is causing the POST to fail. However it is locking rather than simply not finding the drive properly.
I would locate the RAM SODIMMs and reseat them. May not achieve anything but could have an impact on startup if it isn't the HDD causing the POST failures.
If the HDD is in fact on the way out, then I/O will suffer and thus performance. The basic spec. of the machine may be dated, but is still more than adequate for the tasks you require. Make a good backup and try a defrag. hopefully it will be OK. If not then a new drive and a clone is in order, assuming of course you don't consider the price uneconomic for this machine. If possible I'd test the drive in a known good PC in case there are I/O issues on the M/B.
--=-- My credo: If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing - just ask my missus, she'll tell ya --=--You're only paranoid if you're wrong!
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One thing i see is that you have Two sound cards sharing the same IRQ the USB and Card Buss are both 16 I would disable one sound card maybe even two, and attach a mixer to handle all the connections you are using three cards for.
HP Win 11 12 gig ram, Mac mini Sonoma with 16 gig of ram, BiaB/RB 2026, Reaper 7, Harrison Mixbus 11 , Presonus Audiobox USB96
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I had a buddy call just last night with similar problem. We found that by disconnecting a DVD drive he was able to boot up. Something must have been happening when the OS checked that drive, because it would shutdown during boot ... and once in a while when he did get booted up all the way, it would shut down as soon as he put a disk in either of the two drives using that IDE cable
Disconnecting one at a time revealed the culprit drive.
I do not work here, but the benefits are still awesome
Make your sound your own!
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RealBand
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The thing about IRQ's is that they are an INPUT to the system. Conceptually, the CPU is the computer and EVERYTHING else is a peripheral - including the RAM... Any peripheral that wants CPU time must generate an interrupt to catch the CPU's attention... So, if a peripheral is OUTPUT only then it will not need to generate an interrupt even if it has an IRQ assigned. Some device drivers can even be configured to make the CPU poll the device rather than depend on an interrupt. Your video display is an output device. A sound card is (usually) an output device. Exceptions with sound cards would include those with onboard synths - many of these use the CPU and system RAM to power the synth and store soundfonts - these cards would need an IRQ. In Johns case, the Creative PCMCIA card would use its IRQ. The Realtek that's on board probably would not (though I could be wrong here). I'm not certain about the USB Exitgy but it probably uses the IRQ as well. So, 2 devices that probably use the IRQ and 2 that probably don't. As long as the drivers for these devices chain the IRQ handlers properly there should be no problem BUT if there are any issues with the drivers then I would expect things to misbehave. Ditto if there are BIOS problems 'cos there are basic IRQ routines in the BIOS that are called by the OS (including the drivers). Once upon a time you COULDN'T share IRQ's. These days it is best practice to avoid it but if you must then try to choose low bandwidth devices to share. I.E NOT the HDD controller or your NIC (Network Interface Card)  Unfortunately you don't always have a choice. After all the above waffle, I notice that John had good results with an external USB drive - funny that it still shares the same IRQ thats in question. this makes me feel confident that the real problem is most likely not an IRQ sharing issue but rather points straight back to the HDD I/O. John, with that in mind, has it always had this problem or has it just developed recently and if the latter then what changed? If you don't know of any changes (particularly to software or additional hardware) then I think I'd have another look at the HDD (either full, fragmented or failing). If its always had the problem the I'd suspect the HDD is a low performance one.
--=-- My credo: If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing - just ask my missus, she'll tell ya --=--You're only paranoid if you're wrong!
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G'day rharv, Quote:
I had a buddy call just last night with similar problem. We found that by disconnecting a DVD drive he was able to boot up. Something must have been happening when the OS checked that drive, because it would shutdown during boot ... and once in a while when he did get booted up all the way, it would shut down as soon as he put a disk in either of the two drives using that IDE cable
Disconnecting one at a time revealed the culprit drive.
We find that a bit on desktop systems that use IDE - the optical drive gets a bit dodgy and stuffs up the bus*. It seems to that the push to manufacture optical drives a cheaply as possible has resulted in reliability problems with some manufacturers. We used to see a LOT of Sony's do this but they seem to have gotten their act together more recently. SATA devices work differently and shouldn't cause these kinds of issues.
Note that we don't normally see this happen in Notebooks...
* In an IDE based system, the AT bus is extended out to the drives via buffer circuitry. The master device actually controls I/O for both itself and the slave device so if either device has a problem that affects bus access it will prevent the other from functioning correctly.
--=-- My credo: If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing - just ask my missus, she'll tell ya --=--You're only paranoid if you're wrong!
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Well I've done all sorts of tests drive, memory, etc and everything says it's fine.
My final observation is that if I have the zoom level way down it scrolls fine. If zoom in to about 6 seconds showing on the screen it scrolls perfectly. It's just some of the intermediate settings. If anyone has time try setting up 12 RT at 120 BPM and play with the zoom level and see if you get stuttering. BTW I have the audio buffers at 500 and never misses a beat.
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Sounds like its a simple performance issue - slow drive?
POST failures may just have been odd glitches...
--=-- My credo: If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing - just ask my missus, she'll tell ya --=--You're only paranoid if you're wrong!
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In an older laptop, a few POST failures might also be indicative of the borderline BIOS battery, too.
--Mac
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--=-- My credo: If it's worth doing, it's worth overdoing - just ask my missus, she'll tell ya --=--You're only paranoid if you're wrong!
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