Everything was going fine until I bought a new hard drive.

[Dan Bowyer]

Actually everything is going fine except for the new hard drive.

I bought a Western Digital 160GB drive because I recently started capturing video after getting a Sony DVD burner. It was too much to continuously capture to the old drive. I had to delete my work after each project.

The problem is that the new drive is not capturing successfully. It captures very slow, with noisy audio and extremely sporadic video frames. I am using Sony Screenblast Movie Studio 3.0 software. If I transfer files to the new drive, they seem to be okay. It's just when I try to capture to it that I have problems. The drive is 7200 Ultra DMA and is the slave drive.

There is one kind of unusual thing I don't yet have a grip on. It's a 160GB drive, but only shows up as 149GB capacity.

Any thoughts are appreciated.

Thank you,
db

[Marc Peters]

One quick question - have you enabled DMA?

[Dan Bowyer]

Hi and thanks for your help.

I was just looking at that. Under DMA settings, I have "DMA if available" set under transfer mode. I am unclear about the following, however.

There are two IDE channels listed--Primary and Secondary.

Is the first channel my hard drives and the second my CD-ROMs? Or is the first my main hard drive and the second my newer hard drive?


At any rate, the settings listed in these two are as follows:

Primary IDE Channel:

Device 0: currently running DMA 5
Device 1: current transfer mode Not applicable

Secondary IDE Channel:
Device 0: current transfer mode DMA 4
Device 1: current transfer mode DMA 2

The Device types are both set to Auto Detect. My only two choices regarding transfer mode are "DMA if available" and "PIO only".

Thank you again,
Dan

[Marc Peters]

Always go for DMA mode. How have you hooked up the second drive? Did you hook it up using the same IDE cable as your existing drive? The drives will run fastest if you can give each one its own channel. Try powering down, unattaching your optical drives, putting the new drive on IDE1 and the old one on IDE2 and testing (note you wont have any optical drives!).

Did you fdisk/format the drive?

[Dan Bowyer]

I have a feeling the formatting of the drive might be the answer. I can't imagine that being on the same cable would make the difference. Would it? I could try that for the sake of finding the problem.

I don't know what fdisk formatting is. I used Partition Magic 8.0 to format the drive. I had some trouble installing the software that came with the the unit, so I just used Partition Magic.

Do you think I should re-format the drive? If so, would I do so from a DOS prompt? It has been a while since I have done this, so I'll try to get a refresher if this is the case.

Thanks,
db

[Marc Peters]

To be honest, it shouldn't be a problem that's solved by formatting. The best way of testing the drive is to put it on its own IDE channel.

Fdisk is an old DOS programme. I think it used to be on the old win 9x boot discs. Boot up with an win 9x boot disc, go into DOS, run fdisk from the a:/, delete all the partitions and then create one partition (the size of the disc, formatted to FAT32 for 9x or NTSC for XP). Been a while since I've done it to be honest.

If you can't fix it, I'll fun it past a PC engineer for you

If the drive is faster than the old one, I'd create a smallish partion (around 20gb) for the OS, and install the OS on that drive. Once it's installed, check capture on the drive under the newly installed OS (take out the old drive for the time being). If it works, use the old drive for storage only. If you're running into problems, take the offending drive back and exchange for a new one!

I can't really think what else to reccomend to be honest.

[Dan Bowyer]

Thanks,

I'll try a few things. I don't understand what the problem is either. I'm not an expert, but not a complete novice. It doesn't make a lot of sense. I will try a few things and maybe I'll install an operating system on the newer drive. I don't know.

Thanks again. When I find a fix, I'll let you what I did.

db