2006-05-26, 09:59 AM
Hello All,
I'm writing this up just incase anyone else suffers this problem, I couldn't find it in a search on the boards so here it is. It was a couple of days hair pulling excercise to work out what was wrong, and if I can save anyone else the experience, it'll be worth it.
I had a nicely setup system, running an older processor, but still enough, and a good sized chunk of RAM. The hard disk I was using for recordings was an older, but still seviceable (until I can get hold of a better one), 40GB PATA disk.
After a few days of testing, I found that my recordings were stuttering badly on playback. Recordings that previously were ok also started doing it. Playback in GBPVR and Windows Media were the same awful stutter.
Anyways, after lots of GB-PVR reinstall attempts and general fiddling, heres what I found;
Windows XP apparently has a "feature", where if it detects six access attempt failures on a IDE channel *ever in the lifespan of the disk*, it falls back to a lower transfer mode. ie. UDMA 5 falls back to UDMA 4 etc, all the way back down to PIO mode. For some reason, my disk had managed to fall all the way back to PIO mode, hence the awful playback, due to the low transfer rate.
If you check your "IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers" under device manager, you can see what mode each channel is currently in.
The really nice part of this *feature* though is that you cannot manually set it back up to UDMA without REINSTALLING THE DISK. :mad:
There is a solution through the registry though, see this page:
http://winhlp.com/WxDMA.htm
On that page there is also a registy hack that prevents this mode from occuring, by resetting the counter as soon as it sees a sucessful transfer. After applying this reg hack I have not seen this problem again.
Anyways, I hope this helps somebody!
I'm writing this up just incase anyone else suffers this problem, I couldn't find it in a search on the boards so here it is. It was a couple of days hair pulling excercise to work out what was wrong, and if I can save anyone else the experience, it'll be worth it.
I had a nicely setup system, running an older processor, but still enough, and a good sized chunk of RAM. The hard disk I was using for recordings was an older, but still seviceable (until I can get hold of a better one), 40GB PATA disk.
After a few days of testing, I found that my recordings were stuttering badly on playback. Recordings that previously were ok also started doing it. Playback in GBPVR and Windows Media were the same awful stutter.
Anyways, after lots of GB-PVR reinstall attempts and general fiddling, heres what I found;
Windows XP apparently has a "feature", where if it detects six access attempt failures on a IDE channel *ever in the lifespan of the disk*, it falls back to a lower transfer mode. ie. UDMA 5 falls back to UDMA 4 etc, all the way back down to PIO mode. For some reason, my disk had managed to fall all the way back to PIO mode, hence the awful playback, due to the low transfer rate.
If you check your "IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers" under device manager, you can see what mode each channel is currently in.
The really nice part of this *feature* though is that you cannot manually set it back up to UDMA without REINSTALLING THE DISK. :mad:
There is a solution through the registry though, see this page:
http://winhlp.com/WxDMA.htm
On that page there is also a registy hack that prevents this mode from occuring, by resetting the counter as soon as it sees a sucessful transfer. After applying this reg hack I have not seen this problem again.
Anyways, I hope this helps somebody!
