Blackboost

I swapped the IDE cable for the one that was connected to the optical drives and the problem seems to have disappeared. Thanks for all the quick replies guys!

Hi guys! Once again I'm in need of help. A frind of mine just bought a brand new Dell Dimension 3000 desktop with the following specs: P4 2.8GHz 512 DDR400 RAM DVD-RW drive 80GB HD He asked me to update it and change some parts for him. So I swapped the memory for 1GB Dual Channel DDR400 Corsair, added a PCI GeForce video card and round IDE cables. Then I updated the OS (to SP2) and drivers in the PC. It was working top notch until he decided to add another HD to the PC. He bought another Maxtor (exactly the same one that came with the PC) 80 GB HD. I installed and then the problems started. Here are my observations: 1. I went to the device manager to check the transfer mode of the HD and it was set to Pio Mode only and the OEM HD was reduced from UDMA 5 to UDMA 2! Before the installation the OEM drive was working perfectly at UDMA 5. 2. I unisitalled the IDE Primary Channel to see if upon reboot both drives worked at UDMA 5. It didn't happened. I went to the registry and deleted the Master and Slave IDCheckSum entries in the respective channel and that didn't worked either. 3. I checked the BIOS and it doesn't seem to recognize the Primary Slave device. If I change it from Auto to Manual it changes to unknown device. 5. Finally I removed the IDE cable from the 2nd HD, rebooted the PC and now it recognizes the OEM HD as UDMA 5!!! I installed every single update from Dell's site and there are no more updates to add to XP. Am I missing something here? Any ideas guys? How come when the IDE cable is intalled in the 2nd HD, the primary HD changes to UDMA 2 and the 2nd to Pio Mode Only?

Make sure that the Automatic Update and Backgroung Intelligence services are on Automatic on the Services directory. You can leave Automatic Updates turned OFF in the System Properties Window. Then go to Windows Update page and let it find out which Updates you need. Select the ones you want to download and install them. Reboot the PC and then change to Disable the Automatic Updates and Background Intelligence services after you're done.

Problem Fixed!! And it wasn't the mobo or the PSU. It turns out that when I hit reset after the black screen appeared for the first time, the hard drive started to reset itself continously. After I got it to boot, the system was very slow. I decided to play a little bit more with the PC today, so I went to the Device Manager to check the IDE Primary Controller to see in what mode the HD was working. To my surprise it was on PIO Mode Only. I did a little bit of googling and found and article fro mMicrosoft in which it tells you to delete the driver from the IDE channel you want to revert to its "normal" state. I did that, rebooted the machine and voila!!! Problem solved!! No more strange sound or pauses in games. After that I went to buy a 500W PSU as a safety measure. I'm also looking forward to changing the Economic Crappy s*** mobo later on for an ASUS.. But for now, the ECS isn't to blame. Thanks for all the help guys!!

I was just asking given that I'm no expert at this hardware stuff. Hoever, I'm going to get the power supply tomorrow and then I will see what I can workout with the retailer if the mobo is trashed again. Thanks for all the responses guys and if anyone has other ideas, please post them.

Okay, I think I'll get a new power supply tomorrow since it had to be upgraded sooner or later. Also I forgot to mention on my previous post that the HD list is flicking constantly, even whenb the PC is in idle. I read somewhere else that the flickering is a good indicator of a trojan or virus in the system. I'm always updating my AV software (F-Prot) and after running the scanner a few times I didn't found anything. Does the flickering mean anything else? Thanks for the prompt response

Hi guys, I'm having a strange problem with my PC since this morning, so I think its time to ask for help before I end up breaking it up with a hammer this time. Background info: This is a new AMD system I built myself about 3 months ago: ECS KT600-A motherboard AMD 2700+ Athlon XP cpu WD 80GB hard disk 1GB PC 3200 memory ATi Radeon 9800SE 128MB (flashed to XT specs) with Artic Cooling VGA Silencer Rev.3 NEC 3500A DVD-RW drive Windows XP with SP2 (nLITE version) All drivers are up to date. The same goes with the BIOS Here's the situation: 2 weeks after building the system, I wake up one morning and proceed to turn on the PC. To my surprise a black screen was everything I got. I had a Radeon 9200 at that time, so I proceed to test the card on another PC. It turns out okay. I check every component in the PC (minus CPU and mobo) and they turn out to be okay. Finally, I took the mobo and CPU to the retail store I got them from since it was still in warranty. They tested them and find out that somehow the CPU Socket had separated from the motherboard a little bit. This wasn't allowing the PC to work. They gave me a new motherboard from the same brand and I got on my way. I put everything back together and problem solved. Now... I started adding a few things to the rig after the incident since I had the money. I got a Thermaltake Silent Boost CPU Cooler, a hard drive cooler, 3 case fans and a PCI exhaust fan. Yes, that's a lot of fans but I got them for pretty cheap. Besides, its better to have more ventilation than none at all. I then got an ATi Radeon 9800SE card and flashed it to XT specs after getting a VGA Silencer for it since the stock fan is a POS. I installed everything on the rig and it was working fine till this morning. I woke up and proceeded to start the PC and guess what happened? The frigging black screen was there again! I hit reset and this time the hard drive sounded like it was resetting itself over and over again. I proceed to open the case and whiggled the IDE cable and the power connector going to the hard disk. I hit power and now the PC booted, but it took a lot of time to get into Windows. Thing is that I have tweaked the OS (services and stuff like that) to make it boot and work super fast. So that made me a little suspicious that something was really messed up again. I decided to put a little stress on the system by playing Doom 3. To my surprise, the PC started making a weird sound (like pub-pub-rub). Like when you diconnect and reconnect the speakers jacket over and over again. Plus the game kind of freezed for an instant every few seconds. I closed the game and then opened Winamp. The same sound appeared again, plus the music was like in pause all the time. I played a little video with WMP 10 and the same thing happened also. I isolated the problem to 2 areas right now: 1. Motherboard got trashed again 2. PSU might be dying. This is the only thing I haven't upgraded in the rig and its just a 300W unit that came with the case. I think all the stuff that I have connected to it right now are finally killing it. Anyone has any ideas on what it might be? CPU perhaps? Video card? Sorry for the long post and thanks in advance for spending a little bit of time in reading this. Regards, James

The new Omega Drivers based on ATI's 8.07 Beta Drivers are now available for download. Check the out at: http://www.omegadrivers.net/ What is so special about them? In Omega's words: " These are based on the ATI 8.07 Beta drivers, which incorporate some major performance improvements over previous drivers for cards with 256MB of ram, and some small improvements for the rest of the cards. Second, a lot of changes have been made in this release, most of them enhancements and fixes, so PLEASE, take a look at the readme file in the downloads page BEFORE mailing me with questions, I'm really tired of getting questions that are already answered in there. Third, the Omega Control Panel has changed and new stuff has been added, so if you have any questions about it, just take a look at the new "CP HELP" ATI section I designed, it explains most of the advanced settings. Fourth, I'm proud to announce that this is the FIRST DRIVER SET IN THE WORLD to incorporate fully working controls for the new ATI "AI" feature, and great part is, there is no need to install CCC or .NET in order to use it. ATI won't be relasing drivers with AI support until Cat 4.10 and I guess other "people" will start releasing drivers with support for AI now that my drivers are out, oh well, let's see IF they manage to make it run without CCC... Fifth, I have excellent news for laptop users that had the video problem since Cat 4.6, take a look at the readme for the full info. Enjoy"

The Omega Drivers v.2.5.76 are now avaiable! http://www.omegadrivers.net/

*Update* After doing some research around the web I found that Doom3 dfoesn't like Clone CD, Daemon Tools, Alcohol and possibly Nero Burner. XtremeMAc mentioned this in his post, but I didn't gave it much thought because I don't have Alcohol or Daemon Tools in my PC. However after reading that Nero might be at fault too, I tried unistalling it (version 6.3.1.20) and voila!! The game started after placing Disk 1 on the CD-Drive. Seems to me like Nero doesn't cut it too.

Why not immediately use a nocd-patch? That's alot easier! No CD switching anymore! B) This fixed my problem!! Woooooohooooooooo!! Thanks a lot for the information. Also thanks a lot to everyone that replied to this thread. I did tried updating the firmware but that didn't solved the problem.

1. Yes 2. Yes 3. No I'll try checking for firmware updates. Thanks for replying guys!

Hi guys, Well I got Doom3 yesterday, but didn't installed it until today. Anyway I insert the first CD and proceed to enter the key. The installation procress starts and soon asks me to insert the 2nd and then finally the 3rd CD. After the game is installed, it tells me to insert Disk 1 again to strart playing. Just when I press Play on the menu screen, a small box pops-up displaying the following message: Cannot locate DOOM 3 Disk 1 Please insert DOOM 3 Disk 1, select OK and restart application The thing is that Disk 1 is indeed inside the drive!! I have tried unistalling and reinstallling the game but the same thing keeps happening. The specs of my PC are: AMD Athlon 2700 XP KT600-A 1GB of PC3200 DDR400 RAM ATI Radeon 9200 (I know it's a bottle neck, but only until next week.) Windows XP Pro with SP2 slipstreamed;) All drivers are up to date Anyone has an idea of why this might be happening? Thanks in advance...

It's sad to see that the trick was removed. It brought be best of two worlds together: an excellent AV porgram and no system resources used whatsoever! Thanks enuffsaid for having shared this with us.

Can I use the [GuiRunOnce] method used in the XP Unattended to install the applications?