Probs with new PC *BEGGARS BELIEF*

Ok, that should be an easy fix.

Go into your BIOS. Somewhere in there, you will see a setting for assigning your IDE drives to either the NVidia RAID function or to normal IDE. You want your CD/DVDs to be normal IDE.

If you want to get rid of the Removable Devices thing, you can try removing all drives from the RAID chip's control. If that renders your computer unbootable -- highly possible -- just put your hard drive(s) back under the RAID function again.

Obviously, don't remove any hard drives from RAID control if you are actually running a RAID.

Edit to add: if you have an SATA hard drive, just set all the PATA ports to be regular IDE, that should solve it in one.

I'll bear that in mind, thanks. I'll suggest that to him tomorrow - but I want him to walk through the process on the phone with me. That way he can't say I was buggering about needlessly.

And yes, we're running RAID.

We're getting a new mobo put in. We had all sorts of weird stuff- I checked the drives were connected to the mobo, they were. Turned the machine on and they worked. Restarted the machine and they were off. Took out some RAM and they worked again. The guy decided the new mobo was the best option.

Here's the state of play. Your advice appreciated.

On the motherboard we have at the moment, there seemed to be a conflict between the Nvidia onboard NIC and he wireless card. So we removed the wireless to put in a separate comp and bought a wireless dongle.

Bearing that in mind, the guy said he's tested everything since the disk drive issues and says nothing is wrong with the components. He removed the Nvidia Forceware Drivers and that seemed to have fixed things. If we want, we can have a new motherboard of equal or better spec.

Considering this is a board with Nvidia components, should we stick with it and do without the Nvidia drivers (bearing in mind we had to take out the wireless card too) or plump for a new mobo?

I'm tempted to get the new mobo. It seems unwise to have a card with Nvidia stuff on it if we can't use the Nvidia supplied drivers. And what if we want to put a wireless card in at a later date?

My normal thing with NVidia chips is: install most of the drivers, but never never install the NVidia IDE drivers, and install the absolute minimum possible with the network drivers.

Once the network drivers are installed, turn off all firewalling and anything that says 'offload'. There's "TCP Checksum Offload", among other things. That stuff causes big problems. Then I'd try your wireless card again... if it still breaks, maybe you should go for a different chipset/CPU?

What's the brand of the wireless card?

Not sure of the brand. Changing the CPU isn't an option - it's the fastest one he provides. I'll recommend your recommendations.

We took the computer to the guy again. (Again.) He put a new mobo in. He sent us an email saying everything was fine. Then he sent another email saying the new mobo wouldn't recognise the DVD drives either. Brilliant.

THe guy rang around and found out that Windows XP 32-bit really doesn't like too much RAM in it. I know GG mentioned this earlier. But it's not that it doesn't use the RAM - it just doesn't f*cking like it. It doesn't recognise it, but somehow it knows it's there and it tastes like cod liver oil. It can kick off randomly, whether it's 4GB or 3GB. The guy took out 2GB of RAM and the computer ran solidly.

But the problem is we need the RAM. We need to manipulate photos. So the guy suggested we move to XP 64-bit; that'll handle the RAM. GOod! No. Because we can't guarantee that XP 64-bit will run all the applications we need to. Some of the apps we use were made when 64-bit wasn't around.

So the computer guy is going to test the machine with 3GB of RAM and see how solid it is. He went from 4GB going wonky to 2GB working, so hopefully three's the magic number. (To qoute De La Soul.)

And if 3GB doesn't work? Well we stick with 2. WHich seems a bit f*cking useless to me, but trying 64-bit XP is just too much of a risk.

As long as you have 64-bit drivers for all your hardware (check AHEAD OF TIME), you should be fine with XP-64. You lose 16-bit compatibility in 64-bit mode (a stupid decision by AMD), but unless you have exceedingly old software, you should be fine.

The specific issue is that some older installers are 16-bit. The software, written in 32-bit mode, would run fine, but the installer won't. You can generally hack your way around that by installing into a 32-bit image under VMWare, and then manually copying files and making registry changes. That's a giant pain in the butt, but it should work for almost anything written since 1995.

Anything written or updated post-2000 is likely to install and run without issues.

THanks Mal, but we don't have the luxury of time. The guy's going to Vegas for a conference and we just want this sorted. Also this PC is going to be used in the office - so when it's out of order, or we're f*cking about trying to get things to work, it's not making us any money.

It's a trade off, to be sure. We want the extra RAM to process things more quickly - but the process of making sure things work with that extra RAM could be costly.

It may be the mobo and not XP that is causing the problems. Some models of motherboard just don't like having all the RAM slots filled for some reason. I had a nice ASUS mobo a while back that was rock solid until I filled the last RAM slot, for a total of 1.5GB of RAM. All of sudden I had BSODs and hard locks galore. Were those DVD drives detected properly by the BIOS? If not, I don't see how the problem could possibly be XP.

Also, can I ask what sort of gargantuan photos you will be manipulating that require 4GB of RAM? I do a fair amount of photo and video editing at work and 2GB generally works well for me, unless I'm simultaneously working with a lot of very large files in multiple apps.

We're going to be scanning negatives and converting them to .tif files. Also doing batch processing on RAW files. We need a computer that can run that sort of thing in the background, but still have enough power for Word, Outlook , Adobe and so on.

We've tried two mobos by different manufacturers - both failed to recognise the DVD drive at random points. Both mobos were set up for RAID, SLI and Firewire. The guy that built the machine was very confused as well.

Past a certain point, it won't matter anymore anyway... individual 32-bit programs can generally only see 2gb anyway. In 64-bit mode, you get the ability to run multiple 2gig 32-bit programs at once, but a program has to be in 64-bit mode to see any more than that. (you can also use a /3gb switch to allow up to 3gb per process, but that's not always compatible.)

I believe Photoshop has the ability to use a dedicated scratch drive. This lets it use more 'memory' by manually swapping data in and out -- much like the OS would, except that Photoshop can use more than 2gb this way.

The main problem with this approach is that disks are slow. If this seems to do what you want, but it doesn't run fast enough, you can improve the speed a great deal by buying one of the memory 'disks'. These things are just a bunch of RAM on an expansion card; they look like a disk to the OS. They're volatile; they go away when the power shuts off. Each time you power up, you have to reinitialize the disk, which of course takes only a few seconds.

Double check and make sure that Photoshop (or whatever program you're using) does indeed have this swap ability, and that it seems to do what you want. If it does, you can maximize speed by putting that swapfile onto a memory disk. Don't use flash -- flash is slow and wears out from that kind of use. You want a DRAM 'disk' instead. If you're interested, I should be able to find pointers.

Oh one more thing: did you triple-check with the guy that he removed the PATA ports from the NVidia RAID function?

I sent the information over about th Nvidia RAID drives and he got a bit uppity. In this sort of situation we're in the maker's hands.

1DGaf, if he's getting uppity with you, I think it's time to return that unit and find a new PC builder. It doesn't work, it has never worked, and now he's giving you a hassle? Just get your money back and look elsewhere.

Well in an email he said 'Everyone has their own opinions' with an exclamation mark; suggesting 'Don't take advice from message boards'. Of course later on the f*cking thing broke down and that's when he figured out what the RAM problem was.

The situation is this: because we want XP, we'd have this RAM problem whoever we went with. We've put a lot of time into this guy now and he's very apologetic to us. He also knows that we may want another machine. That's useful for future dealings, if we have any.

And before all this hassle, my dad was in contact with the guy for six months. THe builder never tried to push us to a sale or nudge us in a direction. He's always been straight and fair. Recent annoyances aside, that's useful to have.

1Dgaf wrote:

The situation is this: because we want XP, we'd have this RAM problem whoever we went with.

That's just not the case. I know of a number of audio pros who run XP rigs with 4GB of RAM and while some of them have had initial problems all of them now have perfectly stable rigs that see daily demanding usage. Until I see some documentation that this is a known and universal issue with XP I remain very skeptical of what this guy is telling you.

Po,

Were they running XP 64-bit or 32? 64 can handle 4GB, apprently 32 can't. We would use 64, but we're worried about compatibility with the software we have / ease of getting the software onto the machine.

EDIT:

Actually if you could ask what they're running, I'd appreciate it.

Many of them have been running 32, since the VST standard has only just recently been updated to work with 64. Of course, audio guys tend to avoid things like high end video cards that soak up lots of PCI bus bandwidth and they also tend to be very picky about motherboards. For instance, NForce4 boards were taboo for quite some time because the way graphics hardware was prioritized in that chip set was known to sometimes cause poor latency in audio hardware.

I just bounced this off my IT guy at the office and he agrees: even XP-32 and 4 GB would not cause these kinds of hardware issues without some kind of hardware or driver problem. This still sounds like chip set issues to me.

XP32 is limited to 4gb of physical address space, period. This means that you just can't get more than 4gb minus ROM space and address space for your video card. There is no way around this that I know of; it's a design decision on Microsoft's part.

Server2K3 will run nearly anything that XP will, and it's not limited to 4gb of physical address space; it'll handle up to 64 gigs. It uses an addressing mode in the processor called PAE, Physical Address Extension. This allows for 36 bits of addressing on a 32-bit processor, or 64 gigs. XP could do this just as well, but Microsoft has decreed that it won't. You have to do some fiddling around with Server2K3 to get it to run consumer stuff; you have to manually turn on hardware acceleration, for instance, in your video and sound cards. It works very well post-fiddling. The only thing I've found that won't run on Server2K3 so far is Gametap.

But even Server2K3 isn't a panacea. The board I'm running right now, the ASUS P5B, 'supports' up to 8gb of RAM, but the chipset is odd. You'd THINK they'd put the ROM space first, and then add RAM on top, but they don't; if you want 4gb of RAM, you have to move the ROM space outside 32-bit addressing. This works fine in Server2K3, but the X-Fi (and, presumably, other PCI-based soundcards) doesn't like that a bit. The X-Fi does a lot of DMA, and it can't DMA to memory outside 32-bits. There may be a fix I haven't found, but so far, I either have to limit myself to 3gb, even in 64-gig Server2k3, or else use another soundcard.

A true 64-bit operating system avoids all of these problems, but does have one of its own: you have to have drivers written in 64-bit mode. Once you have that, you can run 32-bit programs, you can use almost any conceivable amount of memory, and 64-bit software can address the full memory space available. Current chipsets are 'limited' to 48 address bits, or 262,144 gigabytes of RAM. We'll probably be okay there for awhile. Note that Core2 chips are NOT 64-bit: Sandra claims I'm 32-bit only. If you want an assload of memory, AMD is likely to be a much better choice.

FWIW, this is very similar to the problem we had when transitioning from the 640k barrier (16-bit addressing) to 32-bit mode. That was painful, too. Fortunately, this is the last addressing transition most of us will see in our lifetimes. Memory sizes double every 18 months or so, meaning that we use one additional bit every year and a half. If we continue at that rate, 64-bit addressing should last us comfortably until 2050. At that point, those of us that are still alive can snicker at all the kids who are Female Doggoing and moaning about the yottabyte limitations.

Hey 1D, I've started a thread on this over here at gameaudioforum.com. At least one guy has already posted that he's running a stable 4GB system with XP-32.

I appreciate all the advice and action you've all taken. The guy is in Vegas now, but we can pick the machine up from his wife on Friday. I will mention everything you've said to my dad and we'll decide what to do.

Just so you know, the second mobo used the same chipset as the first -- so I suspect that, as Podunk just said, the chipset is the issue. Of course that puts us in a bit of a stick position, because we'd like SLI on there. I suppose we could go for a board without SLI, but that I don't think that's a prudent decision for the future. And switching to Crossfire will be difficult, because we'll have to change mobo and graphics card.

Anyway, I'll keep everyone updated in this thread. Thanks again.

Got the computer back with the new mobo and 2GB of RAM. Booted it up, still nice and quick. Got online without any problems.

But the drives are still missing. I'll check the connections on the mobo, but I don't think that's the problem.

I think we got the computer a month ago. This needs to be resolved.

Yeah, that is total bullshit. It's clear that this builder guy doesn't know WTF he's talking about. I don't know if it's an option for you at this point, but I'd start looking into a refund and buy it from a reputable dealer.

Again, I'd suggest checking that the PATA ports are removed from the NVidia RAID control. It's not hard to figure this out, just wander around in the BIOS a little.

Once you've done that, if you still don't have optical drives, pull them out and double check that they're either both set to Cable Select (usually CSEL), or one is Master and one is Slave. There's generally one set of jumpers on all CD/DVD-ROMS with those three settings. Usually, it's right next to where the IDE cable plugs in.

Thanks Mal. I'm going to cut and paste the suggestions here and email the guy.

Have you tried other DVD drives?

A new DVD burner is ~$30, it'd be a shame for a $30 part to be causing all this trouble.

If your bios sees the drives, but windows xp doesnt...

Maybe you need to go into Control Panel --> Administrative Tools --> Computer Management --> Disk Management. Look on the lower half of the screen (the gray area) and you may see the optical drive(s) listed without a Drive letter assigned for the system.

You can right click on the drive (i.e. CD Rom 0,1) etc and select the "Change drive letter and paths" option to assign them to the drive. Normally this should be all automatic, but just give it a quick see. I believe if no drive letter is assigned to a media device (shouldve happened during intall, but there has been 'tinkering' since)... it wont show up under My computer etc and it surely wont have a path (G:\ H:\ etc)

If the optical drive is listed as a letter prior to the hard drive ones, you might switch it so it is the final drive in the list. (i.e. Hard drives C:\ D:\, followed by cdrom of E:\) I believe if an optical (removable) drive has a drive letter before the fixed disks, sometimes the system cannot it because it likes to have removable media at the end of the list. I wouldnt touch the fixed disk drive letters, but instead just make sure the optical ones are appearing after them. Alter the optical one if need be.

(Sidenote: Even if you have the optical drive as the final letter within windows and you need to boot from it, you can set this via the computer bios that it checks the cdrom for bootable media first before it goes to the harddrives.)

Make sure you are comfortable if you decide to make any changes. The biggest thing to be careful of would be mistakenly changing the drive letter of your root fixed drive. (avoid this, its where windows is expected to be).

Even if you dont make any actual changes.. you can use the above disk management to confirm windows xp has the device listed, but just doesnt have them accessible because of the lack of path designations.

Double posted (sorry) see my idea above. Its one you can check yourself quite quickly.