Random CDRW seeking when gaming/watching movies

[MrBond]

I've got two optical drives in my system, a CDRW drive and a DVD drive. The DVD drive almost always has a disc in it (either BF1942 or a movie).

With my new system (p4 2.6, IS7, 512mb pc3200), the CDRW drive seeks randomly when I'm either gaming or watching divx movies in media player. I thought it was sound card drivers initially, because I was running the non-wqhl certified drivers from Turtle Beach, but I switched to the drivers I was using in my old config and I still got the same problem. Only last night did I notice the drive was seeking during playback, which causes the sound to stutter for a couple of seconds (think a skipping CD player).

This drive worked fine in my old system, no problems at all. The only thing that's changed is the board, ram, and CPU. I tried to burn a CD yesterday and it'd get anywhere between 8 and 41% done and fail (nero would lock up and refuse to be shut down, I'd have to restart to even be able to open up another copy of the program)

It seems to do this regardless if there's a CD in the drive or not.

I'm kind of stumped, is my drive dying? It was working fine two weeks ago, all I did was install the new board/ram/cpu (didn't even move the drive out of the case). It's on its own IDE channel and everything.

Any help is appreciated, thanks guys

 

[Viper96720]

Are you overclocked? I had a cdrw that would burn a coaster if I overclocked the fsb pci was locked.

 

[MrBond]

I am, but it's tiny, From 2.6Ghz to 2.7Ghz (I'm stepping up slowly). I was getting the same "stuttering audio" problem in games before the o/c, but at the time I didn't realize the CDRW was seeking (which is what seems to cause it, it seeks for say 11 seconds, first 5 is fine, audio stutters for 1 sec, seeks for another 5, then stops).

I stuck my USB2.0 burner on and was able to burn 2 CDRs without a problem.

 

[MrBond]

Up for the evening crowd to contemplate

 

[poppyq]

Check and make sure it's not in PIO mode -> Device manager -> properties of the atapi/ide primary and secondary controllers -> advanced settings tab

I've seen this problem way too often.

 

[CGRDylo]

one thing to check (if the "stuttering" in game/music is instead caused by your CPU spiking rather than the CDRW seeking), is to make sure there are no errors in your print queue.

if there are any errors in your print queue, it can cause your CPU to spike every ~1 minute

 

[dnoyeb]

game studdering is not from the CDRW seeking but from some program, probably the game, waiting on the result of the seek.

in my experneice this used to happen when I let the in game music play. once the songs played out the CD would reseek to the beginning, causing a death dealing pause.

 

[Viper96720]

I think you can use powertoys and turn off the cd drives from looking if they got anything in them every so often.

 

[MrBond]

Originally posted by: Viper96720
I think you can use powertoys and turn off the cd drives from looking if they got anything in them every so often.

Yeah, that might be what I need to do, I couldn't remember what program did that.

Controllers are both in DMA mode, so it isn't that. It's not accessing anything in the drive when it stutters (it happens in BF1942, but that CD is in my DVDRom drive)

Sorry for the late response, my subscription notices don't come anymore because my ISP spam filter blocks AT (even with it whitelisted), so I only check here later at night when I get online after work.

Edit - disabling autoplay may have fixed it. I've had winamp running a while now and the CD ejected and just sitting there, it hasn't been sucked back into the computer yet