X-Apparently-From: Message-ID: <006201c09619$435274c0$4d822a40@dbcooper> From: "Patrick Moran" To: References: <3A850A91 DOT 1EE9FC2D AT compuserve DOT de> <3A8986D2 DOT C4734A7A AT compuserve DOT de> Subject: Re: prob audio CD on 2nd CD-ROM with NWCDEX Date: Tue, 13 Feb 2001 16:59:15 -0700 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.00.3018.1300 X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V5.00.3018.1300 Reply-To: opendos AT delorie DOT com I have been following this thread but have not put my two cents worth in. I was curious as to where this would lead. First off, I would like to say this: IDE sucks. Noe that I got that off my chest, I'll explain it. IDE is/was supposed to be a standard. The problem is that no one follows the standard. they take bits and peices that suit themselves and add other stuff to it. Thus you have problems with drives working with one another. I good prime example of this is using a ZIP or LS-120 drive with a CDROM drive. Sometimes you have to play around with them and set the jumpers for master and slave around to get them to work properly. Sometimes you cannot get them to work together at all. A slow drive can affest a fast drive. EIDE was supposed to have fixed all of this, yet it is still here in full daylight with the same old problems. Another example WD with their Caviar drives, used their own methods for high speed which was not compatible with other manufactures drives, so you might have problems getting various manufacures drives to work together. Early SCSI was the same way. but when they came out with SCSI-II everyone started paying attention to the standards and we no longer have those stupid problems with SCSI. I was not even aware that they started making IDE CDROM drives. But I suppose that now with every modern motherboard finally have a bus controller, they might work okay. SCSI has always had busmastering. CDROM writes slow the system way way down when they are burning a CD. However, I have recently seen some software that claims to have eliminated this problem. (Maybe someone actually wrote a program to use busmastering and DMA for burning CDs!!!!!) So before I would blame it on NWCDEX, install MSCDEX and rem out NWCDEX, then play with the drives until you can find a configuration that will work. Personally I don't see why you would need to put it with the fast hard drive. They are slow to begin with. I believe they only have 1mbs maximum burn rate anyway. That is the same as a 2.88 floppy drive. I know that you can use them through a USB port and not lose any speed and that has a maximum of 1mbs or 1.5mbs for burning. For playback you could lose some speed, depending on the playback speed of the drive. Since you got an IDE drive, I am not aware of any IDE adapters for USB like there is for SCSI. You may wind up just having to remove the other CDROM drive. I have had some terrible times getting ZIP and LS-120 drives to work on systems. Eventually you usually can find a magic confuguration that will work. If you do get it to work with MSCDEX, then try it with the same setup and use NWCDEX and see if they still work. It may be purely a hardware problem. Also make sure you don't have delayed writes set for any drives that cannot use them. i.e. only the hard drive should use delayed writes. This can also cause problems. In fact just turn off all delayed writes until you get the drives all to work then try turning it back on if you use it. You may also have to check you CMOS setup and make sure everything there is correct for each drive. Probably best to set them to auto at frist to see if everything works right. As far as I am concerned, IDE was a mess in the beginning and still is. OTOH SCSI uses inteligent contorllers (except the real cheap ones and SCSI-I controllers.) But I never had a problem with my SB-16 SCSI controller and it was not intelligent, in fact it did not even have a BIOS in it. I have a slow tape drive (although it is SCSI-II FAST) and a Syquest drive which will not blow your socks off, and an old 3GB FH SCSI-II FAST HD and a slow (4X) CDROM and they are all happy together. I am getting a UW SCSI soon, should be sent today or tomorrow and use it on the UW side of this controller and it's speed will not be affected by the slower narrow SCSI drives. Someone mentioned something about using the secondary controller for IDE drives and the Primary for EIDE drives. As far as I know (unless you have some really ancient MB or controller) both channels are EIDE and all the newer board have busmastering. However, you do have to put in the PIIX drivers to get the proper PCI bridge installed. This ancient board I have does not have busmastering and it uses some kind of ISA to PCI bridge that is dorky. Most 486 class machines did stupid things like that. They did bass ackwards. Can't wait until I get that K6-III+ 450MHz CPU in for the S1590 MB and torque it to 600MHz! Pat ----- Original Message ----- From: "Utz Zarwell" To: Sent: Tuesday, February 13, 2001 12:11 PM Subject: Re: prob audio CD on 2nd CD-ROM with NWCDEX > Robert W Moss schrieb: > >Did you try swapping the drives or putting both > >drives on second IDE connection? > > No I have not. > Chances are too bad to get new information. > First step is to ask if someone else ran into this problem. > > Regards, > Utz > _________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com