Videos stutter from internal drive, but okay off external drive

[ruggrock]

If anybody can even get me started in the right direction it will be VERY helpful. Whenever I try to play a video off the internal hard drive using Windows Media Player, Real Player, Win DVD or Pinnacle Studio the video stutters badly, but the audio usually keeps up okay. The video capture ability of Pinnacle Studio is also very choppy and unusable. Off an external drive, through my same system, the exact same video files play fine. On the internal drive I have 20 Gigs left on an 80 gig drive and I've defragmented it recently too, with no luck. Any help you can offer will be greatly appreciated. I've tried uninstalling and reinstalling codecs and drivers with no success either. I'm hoping somebody has seen the internal drive bad yet the external drive works ok symptom before and can help. Thanks, Matt

[poisondeathray]

Check to see if you are using DMA transfer mode, not PIO

(Right click my computer, device manager, IDE/ATA controllers, primary channel, advanced settings)

[edDV]

Is this a single demanding file or all files? What format is it?

In general, the OS has priority on the OS drive. The hard drive may be operating too slow or OS may be stepping on your playback.

[ruggrock]

Thanks for the help so far...I haven't had a chance to try any of your suggestions yet, but just to answer the good question posted above, the files that are causing trouble are avi's, and it happens with all (about 7 so far) of them that I try to play. I'll see if I have the same trouble with a different format this weekend. Thanks.

[ruggrock]

Okay, so I tried changing to DMA mode, but it doesn't look like I have that option...In the "Device 0" box I have these settings...Device Type is set to Auto Detection and is grayed out such that I can't change it. Next 'Transfer Mode' is set to "DMA if available" and the only other option is PIO only, which I believe I wouldn't want. Then, finally, the Current Transfer Mode reads PIO Mode, so maybe DMA isn't an option on my system? In the Secondary IDE Channel I do have Ultra DMA Mode 2 listed. Does any of this help troubleshoot? I've also recently retried after turning off all Services and Startup options via msconfig and still no love. Thanks for the help.

[Krispy Kritter]

You may need to reset the IDE channel to get it out of PIO mode (I've never seen this happen for HDD's, it usually only affects burners). There should be step by step instructions at MS.

The quickest way, is to just delete the IDE controllers within Device Manager and reboot. After you reboot, XP will see the "new" hardware and install the drivers (which will set everything back to default). You can then check them, and you should see nothing listed in PIO mode.

Also, if your computer details are correct, you can get a modest speed boost by installing another 512MB of RAM. XP seems to run best with 1GB+.

[ruggrock]

Yeah!!! It's working! poisondeathray & Krispy worked it out just perfectly! Thank you all so much for your help solving this one. I did go to Microsoft to figure out how to reset the IDE channel, but they had some mumbo jumbo about re-installing some hotfix and then Service Pack 1 - I didn't do all that (I already have SP2). They also suggested the "uninstall driver" as a work-around, and because Krispy had suggested that earlier, and it looked about 10 times easier, I did that. Now the channel is back to DMA, and the videos are playing like they used to, and the whole system is working a lot faster. I did find out a tiny bit of information from the MS page that might be helpful for us all in the future, "After the Windows IDE/ATAPI Port driver (Atapi.sys) receives a cumulative total of six time-out or cyclical redundancy check (CRC) errors, the driver reduces the communications speed (the transfer mode) from the highest Direct Memory Access (DMA) mode to lower DMA modes in steps. If the driver continues to receive time-out or CRC errors, the driver eventually reduces the transfer mode to the slowest mode (PIO mode)." You guys rock! I hope I can be as helpful for somebody else in the future! THANKS!

[Krispy Kritter]

Since this occured on a HDD. You may want to get the testing software from the manufacturers website and test the HDD. You could have a bad cable or a failing HDD.