Weird capture problem

[avl1]

Well, everything worked fine for about a month. No or very few dropped frames when capturing in the highest resolution/lowest compression mode. My system is Win98SE AMD XP1600+ with 128MB RAM, 8.4GB system drive, 80GB 7200 RPM Maxtor capture drive and Pinnacle DC10+ capture card.

Last week I tried to capture a movie and got about a thousand dropped frames and a VirtualDub error message "Audio data was lost. Reduce capture rate." Thinking that there may have been a broadcast problem I did some other captures and now I am always getting tons of dropped frames. And what's most interesting the frames are dropped always when the capture file size is between 1.5 and 1.8 GB located at the beginning of the hard drive. If I use the first 1.8 GB on the drive for another file, the capture works just fine. What's even more strange (assuming that this is a hard drive problem) that when I capture to the same file which already exists at the beginning of the drive the problem does not occur.

During the last several days I tried everything I could find on this forum to fix the problem, including upgrading the drivers, adding RAM, reassigning interrupts, allocating a fixed-sized swap file (on a different drive) and reinstalling the operating system. I also ran all possible tests on the hard drive, which didn't give me any errors, and even low-level formatted it. The problem is still there.

Any ideas on what else I can try to fix this? Thanks in advance.

[avl1]

Finally nailed it down to the hard drive, could not be anything else. Replacement hard drive fixed the problem.