OT Tech long

[CobraAus]

hi guys I think I'am back up been a bastard from hell two weeks - very sick Pc thanks to service pak 2 and also on top of that a crook Telstra ADSL connection suffering from new upgrade which produced a DATA STREAM PULSE OF 30 secs I could get on a site but lost it 30 secs later came back up 30 secs later then down again etc I think its fixed as of last night but back to a tale of WO

3 weeks ago I decided to do my 6 monthly maintenance run (old IT habits dye hard)and upgraded
to new buld of XP pro + service pak 2 (very relucantant move) I had bought 4 200 Gig seagate
drives to replace the older 80 gig + wanted to move OS to now empty 80 Gig from a 30 gig
I have always used Nortons Ghost to backup my drives with out a problem so I tried using it to clone old 30 gig to the 80 gig for the first time it GPF in Dos land - strange I thought
tried again same result so I tried using image restore to 80 Gig again GPF wnt on line and found out that yes GHOST will GPF with serice pak 2 sorry hears a couple pos fixes but product discontinued now this is for your info - after ditching Ghost I downloade several trials of shareware that did the same as Ghost and found a very good product called
Acronis true image Vers 8 It did everything I wanted without going to Dos land and much faster
End result OS now on 80gig old 30gig off line and taken out all 200 gig drives installed
and working (O by the way for those who dont know you need service pak 2 installed to be able to get windows to see any drive over 137 gig) (another shifty by you know who)
My trobles had just started - blue screens of death - very slow responce times could not multi task programs that used to use 10% of CPU time now used 80 to 100 % it was taking over an hour to burn an 8 speed DVD so I ran several diagnostic programs and slowly started to get thinks back in place but kept hitting a speed and MS wall with a GIG of Ram on board (more info for you I founf a Product called Tune-Up (shareware again at Tune-UP.com) it ended up optimizing and fixing 90% of the problems where comercial software such as Nortons System works failed completly
This all brings me to the I need some Help from the IT guys on line because I cant find
anything at all on the net
1. 4 drives 200gig are giving a speed rating of 60,000KPS to 67,000KPS but the 2 drives that are on the Mother Boards IDE port 1 (primary) are only rated at 5000 KPS has anyone come across this at all before and are there any fixes.
2. I have 2 Pioneer A109 DVD drive and before cutover could burn on the fly a DVD in 10 to 15 mins it now takes an hour disk to disk and 40 mins fro HD to disk - no help from Pioneer so again any one had this problem before
these are the last two issues I have to fix so any sugestions welcome I have not proof read this so excuse any spelling errors

Cobra Aus with bleeding fingers

[2Stepper]

"Bouncy..... bouncy..... bouncy.... bouncy..." [:D]

<slaps self> Welcome back Cobra! Hate computer woes mate, glad all is well again. Now go getcha some bandaides a-fore ya bleed on everything. LOL!

[Drex]

Thank god I don't know anything about computers:)

[bilbow]

ORIGINAL: Drex

Thank god I don't know anything about computers:)

Amen to that, Drex

[Crimguy]

Regarding the slow hard drive speed: The only thing that comes to mind is that for some reason the drives are not in UDMA mode. I have only had problems like that in Win 98 and earlier versions of linux. Check the properties and see whether it's enabled. There may be a bios setting for it as well (like I said - I haven't seen that problem in a while).

Check if it's in PIO mode - you might be able to uninstall the driver and see if Windows fixes itself, but it could be a PITA.

[Crimguy]

Check the link and see if it's appropo:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.as ... -us;817472

[SuperKing]

If I understood correcty,you have six drives connected to the motherboard now.Is it a 2 IDE + 2 SATA combination or an extra ide controller?Not sure,but I think that sata has problems if all ide channels are populated(at least on 1st generation sata boards).

[CobraAus]

Crimguy was partialy right - drive speeds are now fixed
for those who use Seagate drives I have found out this morning that they come with a factory
default of ATA33 - you can change the BIOS to UTLTADMA5 POI4 but they will still only be seen as ATA33 I stumbled onto a Segate Util from 2003 called ULTRA100.exe has to be run from a dos bootable floopy, when run it will check what the drives are set to and what the highest rating they could be set to - make the change via a dos menu on all drives in the chains reboot and the new setting will take effect
My drives had been set to ULTRADMA5 PIO4in the BIOS but were only reporting a 5000KPS after running util and rebooting all drive are now POI4 and ULTRADMA5 67,000KPS a huge differance in performace I for one had never come across or heard of this before its allways been install drive and thats it and PAGE file speeds
Other makes of drives could also be in the same boat
Now all I need is away to get the system to see 200Gig drives without service pak2 from what I have seen this morning SP2 has trashed hundreds of PC's - Drives and Data nobody is happy
In answer to Superking its an extra 100/133 ide card been running a couple of years now
dont have SATA drives yet

Cobra Aus

[Mr.Frag]

Thats pretty standard Cobra, they also normally ship with the cache in write through mode instead of write caching. Safely first, performance second.