Problems scheduling recording on new hard drive

[Fireshrap]

Hey all,

I'm a relatively new GBPVR user that was so happy with it I ran out and bought a new hard drive, but I've been having problems scheduling recording on it.  All the recordings start fine, but get interrupted 1/3 - 1/2 of the way through (or sometimes after only a minute or two).  I've looked at the logs but I don't see any error messages there.  I got the latest version (.193) but the problem's still there.  

The hard drive is a Western Digital 160 gig HD, formatted NTFS with 4k clusters, and I'm running Windows XP Pro.  My old hard drive is FAT32 and all scheduled recordings work fine on it.  Capture card is a Hauppauge 250.  I'm not completely sure the problem is due to GBPVR because I tried WinTV's scheduler and I didn't see any files at all on the new drive.  I might have configured it wrong though.  Manual recording on WinTV seems to work, but I haven't tried it in GBPVR.

What's weird is that I tried defragging the new drive since it was heavily fragmented (30%)after a bunch of downloads.  Right after that I tried a scheduled recording and it worked fine, so I thought the problem was the fragmentation, but subsequent recordings haven't worked.  I've seen people online suggest turning off Windows indexing for the drive, so I tried that, but it didn't seem to help.  I'm considering reformatting the drive (possibly to FAT32), but I thought I'd ask around.

[sub]

You can get this stored behaviour if you PVR250 is sharing an IRQ with another device (usually turns out to be sound card, or on board sound device). You can see if this is the case by opening the device manager in the control panel, and from the menu select View -> Resources By Connection, then expand the IRQ list. Does the PVR250 have the IRQ to itself, or is it sharing with something else?

This can cause recordings to stop for no reason, and can stop some recordings from ever starting.

[Fireshrap]

I checked the IRQs but they're not shared. I'll see if Hauppauge tech support has any ideas.

[colin]

Hi Fireshrap,

is your new drive shared with a another device? ie. is it a master or slave to something else. Problems can arise if there is a slower device in the chain. OR is it a USB/Firewire drive?

It might be worth looking for some disk writing tests. Don't have any at hand but a search on google might give you something to help optimise the performance of the disk.

BTW where you using GBPVR's direct record or the other one (which i cannot remember the name of) iit might be worth trying the other so as to help figure out the bottleneck.

I assume this a 7200 RPM disk with a cache etc. on it so it should not have any speed issues in that sense?

Cheers,
Colin.

[Fireshrap]

Yeah, 7200 RPM disk with an 8mb cache.  I tried benchmarking it with SiSoft Sandra and the results were more than fine, better than all my other HDs that recording works on.  It is a slave drive, but would there be any issues there?  I installed new Hauppauge drivers from their website, but no luck.  I'm using the Direct Record option, does the other one work for the Hauppauge?  

Thanks for all the help.

[colin]

Yeah, its called wintvcap. Sub used this originally as the capture device until he developed his own. There may be some info on this forum about it otherwise check out shspvr's forum as there is plenty of information there.

Might be an good thing to try and see what happens.

Colin.

[sub]

I removed support for WinTVCap a couple of releases ago. It wasn't going to support the Live TV changes I was making at the time.

[colin]

I was thinking more of trying this independently to see what happens. Though if WinTV's capture causes problems then the problem probably lies elsewhere.

Colin.