MSI 6777 (K7N2GM-L) sound problem

[merk]

This just started happening a few days ago after several months of it working fine. I made no changes prior to this happening.

I've got an MSI 6777 (K7N2GM-L) board. It has onboard audio. The audio playback on the machine now has distortions to it. Sort of like a popping or clicking sound. If the machine is idle, its still annoying but only mildly maddening so But if the cpu is busy, the sound will drive me nuts. I dont think its due to a lose audio cable since i tried wriggling the cable as well as removing it and putting it back in. Plus if it were the cable, then the cpu load shouldnt matter.

This machine is being used as a PVR. Up until now i didnt have a problem with it. Now its practically un-usable. i dont particularly mind if i have to reinstall the OS, since the only thing on there is the OS and snapstream.

Is there anything else anyone can suggest as to what might the cause of this, and a fix for it? There's also a bios update (but no driver update) for the board. But the notes for the bios didnt mention it having any sort of fix for the sound. So i havent tried installing that yet.

I could also put a sound card in the machine ... but since its a micro-atx board it only has 3 pci slots AND its in a small cube case. So to put a sound card in i'd probably have to remove one of the 2 tv tuner cards ... something i dont want to do.

Anyhow, any suggestions?

 

[LiLithTecH]

The most likely caused is a corrupted DLL in the nForce2
chipset drivers.

You may want to update to the latest version before doing
a complete\fresh install of the OS.

 

[merk]

ok i'll reinstall the driver. There's no driver update since i have the most current version. I didnt think it would be a corrupted file, since i thought it would just not work at all, or crash. But certainly worth a try to reinstall the drivers. I'll give that a try later today.

thanks

 

[merk]

well i just reinstalled the sound drivers twice. Once from MSI ... and then a 2nd time because oddly enough microsoft had newer drivers then msi did.

The sound seems slight better, in that the cpu has to be under more load before it distorts. But unfortunately i noticed a new problem. While playing live tv, the video plays fine for 2-3 seconds, then pauses for a fraction of a second, and then continues with that pattern repeating.

I also noticed during the pauses the HD light would flash for a split second on every pause. So i ran the XP disk defragmenter and it said the drive was highly fragmented. Letting it defrag now. I'm hoping that'll clear up the video pausing ... and if i am lucky, the sound problem as well.

 

[merk]

i thnk maybe i might have flakey hard drive. I tried running window defrag on the drive 3 times now, and all 3 times the computer crashed to a BSOD with the error:

C000007b unkown hard error.

i dont know the hexidecimal code was the same all 3 times ... just copied the last one.

Did some searching and the only 2 things i can think of trying are to either reset the BIOS. I'm not sure how/why that would help, but it seemed to help some other people who had the same problem.

I'll also try running a chkdsk with a surface scan.

 

[LiLithTecH]

What is the EVENT ID and Error Source listed in the Event Log?

 

[merk]

its running a chkdsk right now ... as soon as that finishes i'll look up the info in the event log.

One other odd thing ... after it crashes and i reset the machine, windows does not ask me if i want to submit the error for analysis. and i checked the system settings and error reporting is enabled.

 

[merk]

the only errors i found in the event log were from atapi and ID 9 and 11.

Something does seem odd with the HD though. I know a surface scan checking for bad clusters is slow, but i had it running for at least 6 hours and it was only 60% done on a 120gb drive.

Also, just tonight i installed diskkeeper ... so far it hasnt crashed like the windows defrag does. But its also been running for a few hours and its only 37% done. There's about 80gb worth of files on the drive leaving about 40gb of free space, which should be plenty of room for diskkeeper to defrag the drive.

From past experience an hour or two tops should have been long enough for it to defrag that drive,

Do you think the error could be something on the HD failing? or something with the MB/bios? About the only thing in the bios i can think of to check would be if SMART is enabled. although i really dont know what that does, other then its related to the HD.

 

[LiLithTecH]

Generally Events 9 & 11 have to do with response\timeouts of devices.

What is the SOURCE of the error?
(in Event Log will look something like: ATAPI\Ide\IdePort0 )

I have seen this error with Western Digital drives configured as Cable Select
along with a Optical Device on same channel.

 

[merk]

Hmm ... i just tried logging into the machine to look that info up, but its not letting me login, the connection is timing out. Probably crashed again or is in the process of crashing since i left diskkeeper running when i left home today. I can still ping it though.

anyhow, i'm 99% certain the drives are not using cable select. I cant remember if i put both drives on the same channel or not, but i'm pretty sure they are. Its one HD and dvd burner. HD as master.

The odd thing is this has all been working fine now for a few months and just started acting weird a few days ago.

Ok managed to log into the machine:

\Device\Ide\IdePort0

Also right after this error there was:

Source: Disk
ID: 51
An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk0\D during a paging operation.

So does this mean its a problem with the MB ide controller? or with the HD? I have an extra HD i could clone from the current drive and try running the machine off that one.

 

[merk]

it definitely seems to me as though the HD is going very slow. As i said before i ran diskkeeper and it said the drive was heavily fragmented. This is the 3rd or 4th time i am running it since its taking several runs to fully defrag the drive.

But to try and speed things up i deleted some files on the drive. Its a 111 gb partition with 52gb free. It doesnt seem like it should take HOURS for it to defrag that.

I'm just not sure at this point if its the HD thats slow, something in windows, or some other piece of HD. Gonna see if i can snag an extra HD thats big enough to clone the existing drive onto and see if that runs any faster.

thanks for the help and any other suggestions you have

 

[merk]

Figured out the problem. The HD was running in PIO mode. Did some googling and found out if the HD times out too many times, windows drops it down to a slower mode. And apparently the only way to get it to go back to DMA is to uninstall the ide controller in hardware manager and let windows re-detect it.

Hopefully whatever caused it to drop to PIO mode was a fluke. If not, then i guess i'll have to try using another HD.

 

[LiLithTecH]

From the error you posted it is your PAGE FILE (swapfile) that is
the culprit. It can corrupt from bad a ram module, bad sector
on the HD, or several apps or devices trying to write to the same
paging area and the same time.

You may want to delete and rebuild it to see if that helps.

 

[merk]

well so far its been running ok. Doesnt the paging file get rebuilt when i shutdown anyhow?

I assume to delete it i'd have to go into the system properties and just tell it not to use a paging file.

If i get a new HD, do you think it would be a good idea to set aside a 1gb partition to just use for the paging file? I imagine that would at least cut down on it getting fragmented, if nothing else.

 

[LiLithTecH]

Not really.

The page file itself get fragmented so there is no benefit to increasing
it beyond the default.

In theory, the more ram you have the smaller the swap file you should be using,
which is just the opposite of what the defaults do in MS OS's.

RAM is faster than constantly swapping the data to a drive and back to ram.

 

[merk]

i always heard that windows runs better with a paging file, even if you have huge amounts of ram. I've actually tried running my machine with and without a paging file. I couldnt really see too much of a difference one way or another, except maybe while i playing games.

And i wasnt taking about increasing the swap file size. Just creating a dedicated partition the same size as the swap file.

I'm not really concerned about uber performance out of this particular machine anyhow. I expect it should actually run pretty fast since the only thing installed on it is windows and beyond tv from snapstream. So i'm hoping it wont suffer from a gradual slow down the way most windows machines do after you've installed a bunch of crap on them.

Right now with the PIO/DMA thing fixed i'm happy with the speed of the machine. Just want to make sure it doesnt happen again.