Neil Hopcroft

A digital misfit

[Geek] XP/DVD problem

Dunno if anyone can help, but I’ve got a problem with a new machine I’ve just put together. Its based around a little barebones system on an intel 865G chipset with 200Gb SATA disk and DVD-R drive on parallel ATA. Running XP Pro. The system seems to frequently hang when you insert a CD or DVD, not always, around 40% time. I’ve tried the usual turn off DMA, switch around the SATA/ATA channel masquarading, update drivers, search MS KB, turn off hyperthreading, etc. Seems theres a deadlock of some kind and everything just stops responding, must be quite low level. Machine bumbles along quite nicely until you insert a new disk into the DVD drive.

Anyone got any ideas?


Categories: Memories.

/ 4 Comments

4 comments

  2. neilh

    I’d probably agree with that for a main desktop machine – this is a machine to be used by my parents which doesn’t need performance (they’re moving from a PII 300MHz, so even a ‘slow everything’ option is going to outpace the previous machine considerably), and it lives in a small box to sit quietly in the corner. Also my experience so far is mostly with IDE/ATA – my last foray into the SCSI world was with a 330Mb disc and scsi card that came without manuals or drivers but did have a boot rom, so I spent some weeks disassembling the rom to figure out what it was trying to do (back in the good old days of int16). 330Mb was a *lot* for a machine running MS-DOS.

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  3. neilh

    The beauty of ATA is that it runs an emulation of SCSI over IDE bus, so theoretically you can do that out-of-sequence stuff with that too, except I think it was only ever IBM that implemented it properly.

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  4. neilh

    Re: learn something new every day.

    Except there are *some* disk drives that understand it, but you also need a controller that will use it to talk to the drive. Grandi can give you information about that kind of thing, but I don’t remember the details. For some applications it does make a lot of difference, but most users won’t notice, Grandi was running an MPEG streaming server, for which this makes a huge improvement since the drive can sequence reads into a sensible geometric order rather than the order they arrived in.

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