Solved My everlasting XP freezing problem

  • Thread starter Thread starter boaz
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boaz

Hi,

I may have solved my XP-freezing-with-no-reason problem.
I thought it was the memory problem but no...
I thought it was the sound card but no..
I thought it was the motherboard but no...
I thought it was the ACPI thing but no..
I thought it was the UDMA thing but... Aha!

It turns out that when XP is freezing, if I push the eject button from the
CD-ROM driver, XP will un-freeze and come back to life.

I have 1 DVD ROM drive, 1 CD writer, and a 160 Gig hard disk.
The DVD and the hard disk are on the primary IDE together, and the CD writer
is on the secondary IDE by itself.

So, instead of plugging the DVD with the hard disk, I plug the DVD with the
CD writer on the secondard IDE.

It has been 2 days before I have any freezing problem.
I am thinking there must be some sort of timing problem with the UDMA
thingie.
The BIOS says I have a UDMA5 hard disk, and the two DVD/CD drive are UDMA2.
I guess UDMA5 can't mix with UDMA2.





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boaz said:
Hi,

I may have solved my XP-freezing-with-no-reason problem.
I thought it was the memory problem but no...
I thought it was the sound card but no..
I thought it was the motherboard but no...
I thought it was the ACPI thing but no..
I thought it was the UDMA thing but... Aha!

It turns out that when XP is freezing, if I push the eject button
from the CD-ROM driver, XP will un-freeze and come back to life.

I have 1 DVD ROM drive, 1 CD writer, and a 160 Gig hard disk.
The DVD and the hard disk are on the primary IDE together, and the CD
writer is on the secondary IDE by itself.

So, instead of plugging the DVD with the hard disk, I plug the DVD
with the CD writer on the secondard IDE.

It has been 2 days before I have any freezing problem.
I am thinking there must be some sort of timing problem with the UDMA
thingie.
The BIOS says I have a UDMA5 hard disk, and the two DVD/CD drive are
UDMA2. I guess UDMA5 can't mix with UDMA2.
Click to expand...

It is never a good idea to have an optical slaved to a hard drive. Always
put opicals on separate channel. A CD-ROM drive spins much faster than a
hard drive and will slow things down.
 
Look elsewhere. Unrelated.
On an Asus nForce2 A7n8x DeLuxe w. Barton 3000:
Primary channel=> master is Maxtor UDMA 6 (133) 120 gigs as "C:" + DVD
Reader UDMA 2 (33) as "E:" as slave.
Secondary=> 2nd Maxtor UDMA 6 as "D:" + CD/DVD Writer as "F:".
Just screaming for more!!!
Aida32 Enterprise Edition rates my PC as the fastest ever reported on that
nForce2/AMD Barton 3K setup.
 
Must be my motherboard.
Sometimes they get so much noise in the buses to cause all kind of problems
like mine.
 
He is confused.

I am gussing my XP freezing problem is related to the noisy signal generated
within the IDE interface due to the fact that the clock generated for the
UDMA5 device (i.e. my HD) is too fast causing too much noise in the chain
causing the CD drive to fail. And somehow the controller or the software
driver is trying to recover from the noise and put itself in a loop. And XP
doesn't know what to do and waits for the controller to respone. When I push
the eject button, the CD may generate some sort of "cancel" signal to put
the controller or the software driver to exit the loop. So, XP exits the
wait stage and comes back to life.

It is either this or the unknown virus that has been causing all my freezing
problem removed itself once the date passed last Saturaday.

But I really don't care anything for now. I have been running XP for weeks
without any freezing problem at all.
And Windows Explorer is not crashing anymore.
 
that sounds like a wel thought out cause/effect case but it is more likely
that it was caused by a bad driver for the cdrom or the ide control. some
cdrom/dvd/burner manufactureres don't always follow the atapi standard and a
misguided respons from the ide chanel could have made the cdrom search for
media. windows is funny in that it will stop everythign when you insert a
cd in the drive. try is some time. place a cdrom in the drive and wait for
autorun to kick up and try opening other windows or do somethign else at the
same time. i'm guessing that if you disable the auto insert notification or
kept a cd in the drive, it would have stop doing it. any ways good to see
you got it working. if you run accross it in the future, give that a try
before you swap things around. it might save you some time.. then again if
it doesn't work you already know the solution.
 
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