audio skipping from new drive

[saintcloud9]

i hope this post is in the right place... sorry if it isn't....
i'm stuck on this annoying new problem, though, so any advice is greatly appreciated.
i recently added an 80GB Western Digital (with 8MB buffer) to my system, i made two logical drives, one being for music only, copied a bazillion mp3's to it, and now winamp, and windows media both have an annoying skip, or buffer problem. the drive activity light is exactly in synch with the skipping. i have already tweaked with winamps buffer settings, no help there, i removed the "sharing" on that drive, nope, still no help. i have tons of ram (512MB), and besides, i do not have this problem playing from the other hard drive, on which windows has its very own partition. i don't see how being a "slave" drive could possibly be related at all.
if i left out something, please ask ....anyone have any ideas? have i missed something obvious?




System: 1.1 Ghz Duron / 512MB SDRAM / Win 2K pro

[TJM4FUN]

you said the light is in sync with the skip, do you mean the light comes on at the time of the skip?if so that would indicate that there is nothing left in the buffer and it is going for more data.

But the buffer is supposed to still be used when the disk is accessing. Thsi would indicate that the drive may not be seup right, ie running in pio mode. Does the bios report it as a udma
drive? is it on the same ide cable as the other hdd?
Are the jumpers set correctly?

you may also want to try runnign a benchmark program like hdtach on it to see if it takes performnce hits. It is possible the drive is flakey too. See if WD has a diag disk to try.

Just a few thoughts. the fact that the mp3 play fine on the other drive kinda lowers the os and winamp as culprits.

[saintcloud9]

thanks, tjm...

the bios disk settings are all on auto (8 total), when i ran the "drive check" diagnostics tool by booting from the supplied floppy it showed a "current UDMA-100" and another util. ,"quick test" gave me a "no errors found"...both hard drives are on the primary cable, with the original drive as master, at the end, and the new WD slave, in the middle... but get this...

in windows device manager's primary IDE controller/properties, device 1 is set to :

transfer mode: DMA if available
current transfer mode: PIO Mode

i may need to double check myself, in the morning... but,
so i need to get windows to use UDMA, right?
ummm.... :confused:

[TJM4FUN]

yup, pio mode is slow and cpu intensive, not the way you want it to run.

WD drives can be a pain to setup for some people and some systems. Check the website to be sure you have all the jumpers set right, not just the master/ slave.

I also vaguely remember something about w2k and dma mode, but I might be confusing it with something else.
Should I locate my mind, wherever it has wandered off to, I'll
post the info if you can;t resolve it.

[saintcloud9]

ok, well, thanks again. i going to double check my findings and test out western digital's "award-winning tech support", in all likelihood, they'll have a quick solution for me.... i hope.

[Ladypcer]

I'm not sure if this will help at all, but I have a similar setup.
Two drives with mps3 and winamp on slave drive. No skipping problems.
I have them jumpered as Cable Select on both drives and they run in UDMA mode. (2 and 4 respectively) The drives are a QF and a Seagate. Running XP pro.

So, is it the OS that's not letting run in UDMA? or some other factor?

[saintcloud9]

thanks everybody....
the latest findings:
western digital tech support level 2 said to try manually changing from auto in bios to pio 4, this did not change anything. they suggested contacting my mobo manufacturer to see if there is a setting not allowing udma on that drive...
i found this at microsoft knowledge base, i spose i'll have to try it.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;260233

i have service pack 3 already, and the other drive is running in udma fine, according to device manager. guess i'll try the hotfix, and see, or maybe go to cable select on both, per ladypc. by the way winamp is on a different drive than the music, this shouldn't matter, should it?

[Ladypcer]

What motherboard are you using?

[saintcloud9]

AOpen AK73 Pro(A)

http://www.aopen.com/products/mb/AK73Pro(A).htm

i tried cable select, since it worked for you, but no change... still skipping the tunes from the WD drive, and not from other drive.

if i have to i guess i could install windows on it, and make it master... it just seems like i ought to be able to have it as slave, ya know?

[saintcloud9]

oh boy, so i tried the microsoft patch that i posted a link to earlier, and it says this is for SP1, and since i already have SP3, no go. geez, running out of ideas..... guess AOpen is next on the list to call.

[Ladypcer]

I was just wondering if it may be something you need to enable in your bios?

[saintcloud9]

success!!!:D
well, i verified that i was current with windows patches... check.
verified current VIA chipset drivers.... check.
said what the hell, lets uninstall the primary IDE drivers and let windows reload them..... voila! both HD's now in UDMA mode!
oh, yes, and no more audio skipping, yay!

so, thanks to everybodys input, and no thanks to WD tech support:Tong: ... it's simply amazing how often uninstalling a driver and reloading it often solves the puzzle... in my opinion, anyway.

[Alakazam]

Excelent saintcloud9, I'd sure like a nickel fro everytime there has been a software solution for an apparent hardware glitch. Good detective work.