doveman

Yeah, it's the same on my other PC (single SATA HDD in AHCI mode, no IDE devices but IDE interface enabled) with IDE\DiskSAMSUNG_HD204UI_________________________1AQ10001.

It's not running in IDE mode though. I changed it to AHCI (on your advice) quite a while ago. I don't have any other devices (HDD or DVD drive) connected at the moment either, just the one SATA HDD. I might have the IDE interface enabled though. Either way, this is the same as it was when I was making the xperf traces, so if the high latency is triggered when closing MP it should have been reflected in the traces.

OK, I recreated the img, allowing it to format this time, copied it to the CF and added NTLDR, boot.ini and grldr (0.4.4). I checked the MBR and it is NT 5.x Does this HAVE to be done after booting with the card connected on the VL400? I checked the signature and it is 0000 but perhaps this get's changed when booting with the card connected? Also, can I test boot the CF on my PC just to check it's working here or is it important that I only boot it on the VL400? I tested it with MobaLive (Qemu) anyway and that worked fine, so it's probably OK.

OK, I've deleted all problem reports and the file (RacWmiDatabase.sdf 1876Kb) in that folder. I think I'll leave RACtask disabled though as I don't think I really need it and if it's going to cause problems it's not worth the hassle. I was just monitoring with LatencyMon whilst using MP and when I closed MP I saw this Now I connect via VNC to do this sort of stuff (close MP, start/stop LatencyMon) so I wondered if it's just using VNC that's causing these high numbers, but then again I've always used VNC when starting/stopping the xperf traces and they didn't show any such problems so I guess that doesn't explain it. Before starting MP, the latency was around 220us and in that screenshot the current latency is 173us, so perhaps something I did in MP caused a blip. Again I'd have expected that to show in the xperf trace, although I may not have done the same actions in MP when doing those traces, so maybe I should make another trace and try and repeat those actions? EDIT: It seems just loading MP sends the latency to 1200+ and ndis.sys to 0.44, netbt.sys to 0.4 and tcpip.sys to 0.28. When making the xperf traces I was waiting for an video glitch before closing MP and stopping the trace, so I guess it wouldn't have gone back far enough to show what happened when starting MP. If I restart LatencyMon after MP is loaded and then start LiveTV (with MP windowed so I can see LatencyMon), the latency stays below 400us (in a short test) but then when I close MP it goes up to 1200+ again and ataport.sys is 0.32ms, ndis.sys 0.29ms and tcpip.sys 0.20ms. I would have expected the xperf traces to show any blips when closing MP, as I was doing this just before stopping the trace.

Yeah, that's true. Not so much of a drop then

Well no, they weren't clear enough as you said Can you simply do EXACTLY the above, transfer the image to the CF card and report? So you didn't indicate I should allow it to continue to format, nor to copy any files to the CF between "transfer the image to the CF card" and "report" and had I done so I wouldn't have been doing "EXACTLY the above" and considering you've got the hump with me for doing things you haven't told me to, I tried to follow your instructions Anyway, it's clear now I should format the partition (do I need to allow mkimg to do this to get a FAT16 CHS format and transfer the image again or can I use Windows XP's format?) and put those files on there.

It's frustrating I know but let's try not to rake up the past I didn't mix two CF cards in my recent report nor do I think I failed to report what you asked for. I reported what happened when booting from the CF with g4d MBR (failed to load grldr), with the NT MBR (failed to load grldr) and (the only way I could load grldr) booting from the HDD and then checking what geometry g4d reported for the CF. Yes I know, I pointed out the "strangeness" of the differing results between 0.4.4 and 0.4.5c at the end of post #8. Shame you didn't mention that when I said I was going to test with 0.4.6a at the end of post #8 OK, that sounds like a good idea. Having done that (create the img and transfer it to the CF) I have an unformatted 252MB partition on the CF. Common sense tells me I should format it and put NTLDR, BOOT.INI and grldr (0.4.4) on there, otherwise it will be rather hard to make the meaningful report that you ask for next but I figured I'd better check as you're quite clear I should only do what you advise and no more. Believe me, it's annoying me 10x more than it is you and I'll be glad to get it sorted before I lose any more hair

I'm building an XP for my brother's PC and want to install the printer drivers for him. Can I do this without having the printers connected (I don't have his printers) as I seem to recall reading that the printer should be connected BEFORE installing the drivers?

@Kessu Thanks for the tips, seems we're in similar boats RACtask was definitely the problem. Since disabling that I don't get the regular continuity errors (at 35 minutes past) anymore and I haven't seen any "freezes". There are still the odd continuity errors (like the one at 21:03:50) and a lot of discontuity messages, but they don't seem to cause any noticeable problems and may be due to minor signal problems. However, as RACtask was causing problems I'd like to find out why and see if there's anything else that might be causing the remaining continuity/discontinuity messages other than signal problems. I've been advised that HDD load can cause them and so I'd like to re-enable RACtask and monitor the HDD load to see if that is indeed what's happening but I don't know of a good way to monitor the HDD load as Resource Monitor only seems to have a 60sec graph which isn't sufficient. I have no idea how to get the latency as low as 0.1-0.2ms which is quite a drop from 300-400ms but I'll try your suggestions of checking in safe mode and also removing the card to see if that makes any difference.

I'm building a Win7 PC that my brother will RDP into. I'm not sure if he's going to connect his printers to the XP box he'll be using as an RDP station, or directly to the Win7 box but I want to setup the drivers for both eventualities. So I need to install the drivers normally in Win7 and also create a "network printer" for each of the five printers. What's the correct procedure to do this. Can I just install the drivers without having the printers connected, as I think I might have read that they should be connected first before installing the drivers? Assuming I can install the drivers, what then do I do to create an additional "network printer" instance for each one?

Hi I may have stumbled across what's causing the problem (other than VMWare player's services, which disabling certainly reduced the problem a lot). I've done various tests today and the continuity errors appear every hour at 35 minutes past! From 15:03 - 17:05 I had the Xperf trace running with TV Server config running timeshifting and there were errors at 15:35 and 16:35 Then I stopped the Xperf trace and started MediaPortal and watched TV until 19:00 and there were errors at 17:35, 18:35 Then I closed MP, switched power mode from High Performance to Balanced and ran timeshifting via TV Server config again until 21:04 and there were errors at 19:35 and 20:35 (so the problem doesn't appear to be affected by power mode) The obvious thing to check was Task Scheduler. I don't see any tasks that ran at those times but Ractask is the only thing that runs every hour and that ran at 19:07, 18:08, 17:03, 16:13, 15:10, so I'll try disabling that.

I also tried disabling the AMD external events service and the AMD Fuel service, which didn't help. In fact it seems the AMD Fuel service needs to be running as this morning I was getting high render times and jerky video until I restarted that. I then switched back to High Performance power mode and haven't seen a hang today. The Mediaportal logs do show some continuity errors at around 12:30 and it's possible there was a hang then that I missed but I would normally see at least one an hour, so it seems to have helped a lot anyway.

Oh well, thanks for looking at the traces anyway. I've also now disabled my second TV tuner card (WinTV), the USB redirector device (part of VirtualPC I believe) and installed the 12.6 AMD AHCI/Chipset drivers but I don't think it's made much difference and I still seem to get at least one hang an hour. I'm fairly sure disabling those four VMWare Player services made a big difference though, as before that it seemed like I was getting several hangs per programme. Hopefully the Mediaportal developers can come up with a solution.

Well I've now uninstalled VMWare Player and Virtualbox and am still having the same problems. I haven't uninstalled Virtual PC yet as that said it would delete my VM, but it didn't have a virtual NIC installed for it like the other two anyway (which were all disabled but you never know). It does have the "Virtual PC Network Filter Driver" attached to the real NIC but I've unticked that. I started the xperf trace at 08:17 and according to the Mediaportal logs, the last continuity errors were at 09:52. However, I closed MP before making the trace after the last hang I encountered and apparently I closed MP around 09:58, so I've got a feeling that last hang (and perhaps others as well) isn't reflected as a continuity error in the MP logs. I don't know if the trace would go back far enough to catch them, but the logs also show continuity errors at 08:52, 08:42, 08:38. http://www.mediafire.com/?wb45l34pb74zyci

Well I did use the standard XP MBR for the last test and it also had the XP bootsector. NTLDR, grldr and boot.ini were on there and the boot.ini contents were: [boot loader] Timeout=5 Default=c:\grldr [operating systems] multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Windows XP Image" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect c:\grldr="Grub4DOS" and I did make a disk image with the proper geometry and transfer it to the card a while ago if you recall. You've already checked the MBR and bootsector in post #6 and the only thing that I've changed is the partition type to 0C.

OK, sorry for the delay, only just got a chance to try it. With the CF only connected and the g4d MBR and type 0C I get the same as before: Try (hd0,0): FAT32: disk error (hd0,1) -> (hd0,3): invalid or null BIOS: Drive=0x0, H=0, S=0 Try (fd0): invalid or null Cannot find grldr Then when I press a key to boot the previous MBR, the XP boot menu appears, but is hung showing: I/O error accessing boot sector file multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\Bootsect.dos That file is on the CF but I don't know why it's looking for it anyway, as the XP boot menu defaults to grldr. With the HDD connected it loads g4d (0.4.5c) from that and geometry (hd0) shows: drive 0x80(LBA): C/H/S=1943/64/63 Sector Count/Size = 7834176/512, Fat, type 0C I then changed the MBR to NT 5.x with BootICE and booting the CF after that it loads the XP Boot Menu but as before, when selecting the grldr entry it shows: I/O error accessing boot sector file multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\Bootsect.dos which as I say I don't understand why it's trying to load that. Selecting the XP entry gives an error about a missing file (hal I think) which isn't surprising as there isn't an actual XP installation on the CF.

DPCs should be no issue. MediaPortla uses Timers which do some .Net Remoting (SOAP) calls (System.Runtime.Serialization.Formatters.Soap.dll!?) which seems to block the tool. I think such a coding issue causes the hangs. It seems unlikely, as many people use Mediaportal to watch TV without having this problem. Disabling those VMWare services seems to have substantially reduced the frequency of the hangs and I recall VMWare Workstartion caused latency problems for me previously that messed up Mediaportal. Anyway, this is what the MediaPortal developers have told me: "EVR presenter calls SetThreadAffinityMask() to workaround some buggy bios / HW -> http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms644904(VS.85).aspx. In any case it is perfectly valid to call that method, if it triggers some issue then there must be some underlying issue with the HW (or most likely drivers). ISR/DPC <-- those are both kernel level stuff. ISR == interrupt service routine, DPC == deferred procedure call. Both are something that MediaPortal (or any other user mode program) cannot difrectly trigger. After 1.3.0 alpha is out (and you have updated to it) I can build a dshowhelper. dll without that one specific call for testing. The side effect is that it would probably break lot of older systems that are currently working ok (we don't have any clue what HW Microsoft is talking about). It will require quite big amount of testing to be able to remove that workaround from the code - it will affect the video frame scheduling accuracy. In any case I would say that there is some driver level issue on the system where you see the ISR/DPC spikes. "

Hi MagicAndre I managed to substantially reduce the frequency of the hangs in Mediaportal by disabling all four VMware Player services (VMWare Authorisation Service, VMWare DHCP Service, VMWare NAT Service, VMWare USB Arbitration Service) but the hangs still occur and are as severe, just less frequent. MediaPortal's just been updated to 1.3 Alpha, which might have helped a bit as well. I've uploaded a trace just after one such hang at http://www.mediafire.com/?c2444sa1k4hsh0c I also checked with LatencyMon (not at the same time) without Mediaportal running and noticed: Latency stayed under 300 or 400 ms (although I didn't monitor for more than a few minutes) The highest driver time was ndis.sys at 0.3432 ms, followed by tcpip.sys at 0.19 ms and ntkrnlpa.exe at 0.11 ms. All others were under 0.1 ms. (A later run showed netbt.sys at 0.5 ms and ndis.sys at 0.31 ms). Highest reported hard pagefault resolution time still seems high at 32394.7125 us. I've now also uninstalled True Image and will see if that's helped. If not, I'll completely uninstall VMWare Player, as well as Virtualbox as Virtual PC as they all install Virtual NICs (which I have disabled) as well as filter drivers that attach to the real NIC for Bridge Mode, so as my highest times seem to be associated with network components this seems sensible. I'll wait to hear if you can see anything useful in the trace first though.

If it's not easily available, maybe I should just try and get £15-20 for the existing RAM and buy 8GB of something like http://www.ebuyer.com/311409-crucial-4gb-ddr3-1600mhz-ballistix-tactical-memory-blt4g3d1608dt1tx0ceu or http://www.ebuyer.com/235776-corsair-4gb-ddr3-1333mhz-memory-cmv4gx3m1a1333c9 Neither company's website lists those as specifically compatible (seems rather strange that Crucial reckon only that 2GB stick is compatible*) but I can't see why they wouldn't be and Corsair's website, whilst recommending the 4GB kit but not the 8GB kit of that Value RAM, does recommend other 8GB kits (XMS3, Dominator) which the same 9-9-9-24-2T, 1.5v spec. I'm inclined towards the Corsair as it's £4 cheaper per stick, saving me £8 (around 20%) for two. I realise it's only 1333Mhz vs the Crucial 1600Mhz, but I don't believe that will make much difference, even if (one day) we upgrade the processor from the Athlon II X3 425 to a Phenom II X4 955 or better and certainly not 20% difference. *EDIT: Ah, Crucial's website was hiding the rest of the Compatible RAM http://www.crucial.com/store/listparts.aspx?mfr=ASUS&model=M4A785TD-V EVO and it does list other 8GB kits with the same 9-9-9-24, 1.5v specs as well.

How about at Crucial? http://www.crucial.com/store/partspecs.aspx?imodule=BLT2G3D1337DT1TX0 Yeah I looked at their website but couldn't find them and those you've linked to are not CL6 1.8v, nor do they look like the ones in the Ebuyer picture so I don't think they're the same.

Yes I would ideally but I can't seem to find the original sticks available anywhere and I can't afford to buy 8GB, so I was hoping it would be possible to run all the sticks at a common timing and voltage that they would all work at.

My Dad's PC currently has this Crucial 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 1333MHz/PC3-10600 Ballistix Memory Kit CL6 1.8V http://www.ebuyer.com/product/166996 I want to get him another 4GB (2x2GB) to take him to 8GB, but most currently available sticks seem to be CL9, 1.5V so I'm not sure what I can get that will be compatible. I doubt he's running the current sticks at CL6 unless his Asus M4A785TD-V EVO Motherboard http://uk.asus.com/Motherboards/AMD_AM3/M4A785TDV_EVO/ has auto-set them to that, as he certainly wouldn't have gone in the BIOS and set them manually, so if I can run all four sticks at CL9 that would be fine. I'd still have the issue of the voltage though, if the existing sticks require 1.8v and the new ones 1.5v. There's some, like http://www.ebuyer.com/239260-kingston-4gb-ddr3-1600mhz-hyperx-blu-memory-khx1600c9ad3b1k2-4g that run at 1.65v though, so maybe I could run them all at that, assuming the voltage can be set manually.

Yeah, I still get it if I try and boot normally (ControlSet001), only if I select LastKnownGood (ControlSet002) does it boot OK. Strange that error, as I didn't mess with the Mass Storage Controller driver entries in the registry and the actual drivers are obviously not corrupted (otherwise ControlSet002 wouldn't boot) but I'll compare the settings for both ControlSets.

I don't think it gets to write to the Event Viewer if it BSOD on boot. I checked the System log anyway and couldn't see anything. The BSOD was Stop 07B.