IDE Problems ?

Quigs Snr

Hi there,

Have been noticing a bit of a problem recently, my main machine appears to have difficulty reading some CD's (mostly, but not only CDR's). The same CDR's will read no problem on any of my other machines.

The mobo is an MSI KT4 Ultra, the CD Drive is an LG 40X burner (also had a DVD drive, sadly gone to PC heaven, Komplett here I come...yet again). Anyway, halfway through installing something (eg: Combat Flight Sim 3 - Original CD by the way), it tells me some data.cab file is corrupt, it does this with loads of games, if I put the same disk into another machine, eg: an old Asus KV7, with a 52X CD no problem........

Tried turning off DMA and this reduced the occurences of this, but didn't get rid of it... any idea's ? or could it just be some weird copy protection thing like they used to have where CDRW copies of games wouldn't play correctly from a CDRW drive, (although if so then this should not happen with Original CD's, so that can't be the problem......)

Anyone ?

By the way, I also have a Celeron machine somewhere which has also got problems with it's CDRW/DVD combo drive. Basically things take forever to install and sometimes don't at all. Also the autostart can take up to 3 minutes to run (and thats including jiggling the mouse to wake it up which you sometimes need to do with Win98SE..... Anyone else seen anything like this ?

BigEejit

I'd say try to pin it down to machine/OS or cd drive ... swap the CD drives and try to install the game again ... if it installs in the main machine after the swap and not in the other puter then its the cd drive ... otherwise its win98 or your mobo...

SouperComputer

this is very common. try cleaning the lens in the drive (unlikely problem!).

otherwise you'll have to change the drive

Quigs Snr

Hmmm, but the drive still makes perfect 1:1 copies of anything I ask it to, writing is no problem, reading occasionally appears to be and only with certai disks. Certain disks fail all the time, others apparently the same never fail.

Quigs Snr

Ok guys, sorry to drag this one back up, but I have found a resolution to the initial problem and I reckon because so many of us buy from Komplett there is a good chance a few of us have the MSI KT4 Ultra mobo.

The intermittent IDE problems I was having, apparent file corruptions when reading from CD's and unzipping on the HD, CRC errors etc.... is a known issue with this board and has been fixed in the latest Bios for it (Ver 1.3) available from MSI's website.

Just in case anyone is interested.

SouperComputer

cool, that a scary problem though!