Why am I getting a DISK WRITE ERROR message?

[Patrick]

I'm building a computer for a club member and I'm using identical components which have caused me no trouble in the past in similar projects. Unfortunately with this computer, after the operating system (Win98SE) has been installed and I begin to load other programs from their installation CDs, I'm getting the dreaded "blue screen" with this error message:

DISK WRITE ERROR
Unable to write to disk in drive C
Data or files may be lost
Press any key to continue

By pressing any key the process will continue, but I'm not very confident about the integrity of the data. When I reboot, I then get a message during the BIOS display that there may be bad sectors on the drive and ScanDisk needs to be run. However, ScanDisk never finds any errors even when doing a Thorough test. After much experimenting, I found that I can prevent the error from occurring by turning off the DMA mode for the LG GCE-8160B CDRW burner (which is the only CD-rom device in the computer). Obviously though, this is not the solution. I have tried different hard drives, different IDE cables (both to the burner and to the hard drive), different RAM, and a second LG GCE-8160B CDRW burner. None of these swaps changed anything. With the DMA mode enabled on the CD-rom burner/player, I continue to get the error message.

Components that I have NOT swapped (because I don't have any extras at the moment) are the Asus TUSL2-C motherboard, 1GHz Celeron, and 350W power supply.

Any suggestions please?

[Guru]

My old comp at work did the same thing all the time and I still do not know why! It stoped when I upgraded the CPU from a old pga celeron 466MHz to a brand new FCPGA Celeron 850MHz!

[Technoid]

And the burner is ofcourse not on the same cable as the HDD??

Had a similar problem with a computer untill I low level formated its HDD.....

[LvR]

With the DMA mode enabled on the CD-rom burner/player

Silly question maybe, but have you got the Intel INF and IDE drivers loaded there ?.

[Patrick]

Thanks for the suggestions guys.

Guru, I've no plans to replace the 1 GHz Celeron with an 850...

Technoid, the burner and boot drive are both set up as masters on the primary and secondary IDE controllers.

Lawrence, yes the drivers you refer to are loaded. Nothing silly about the question though!

The only thing different about this configuration compared to other computers I've built recently is that instead of a Pyro DV card, I'm using the Pinnacle DV card that came with Studio Version 7. Shouldn't make a difference, but...

[LvR]

Running a Yamaha 2100 CDRW drive here and guess what - its only doing PIO as well when "auto detect" setting are used in device manager (This while a 3rd WD400BB disk is running UDMA5 on the same cable!)

To date, I have not produced a coaster with this drive and are not going to start trying to convince it to run in DMA mode if the system (or itself) thinks it cant.

Maybe you have the same situation there?

[Patrick]

Maybe, but...

In the previous three systems I've built using basically the same components, there was no problem with the burner running with DMA enabled. With the DMA turned off, there is such a huge difference in drive throughput that I'd rather leave it on if possible. True, it probably wouldn't make any difference while burning disks, but I'd like to at least have full playback capabilities while reading disks.

I'm just concerned that there's some component not quite up to snuff...

[Patrick]

Mystery solved, but...

The techie at my supplier determined that it was a faulty Asus TUSL2-C motherboard causing the Disk Write Error message. However, he told me something else that I've never heard of before. He stated that it was incorrect to have the DMA enabled for both the Cd-rom player and the hard drive(s). He stated that I'd be better off to have the DMA enabled for only the Cd-rom player connected to the ATA/33 IDE header and to leave the DMA disabled on the hard drive(s) connected to the ATA/100 IDE header. He said that having the DMA enabled for everything would result in too much data being transferred, more than the system could handle, and that this would lead to further error messages.

Does this make any sense to anyone?

[Wombat]

Your techie is full of shit. There are about 1,000 reasons why he's wrong. Take your money somewhere else.

[Patrick]

Could you be a bit more assertive please!

Your techie is full of shit.

Hey Wombat, don't be afraid of expressing yourself!!!

I suspected he was out to lunch also, but I thought I'd get some second opinions. The supplier I deal with has decent prices on hardware, but I'm glad I don't have to rely on the tech staff there for any other reason than to check components I'm returning for RMA purposes.

[VJ]

Well, we do have some mainboards in our office that limit bandwith on both channels simultaniously. We noticed an underperforming software RAID0 (in Linux), benchmarking in Linux showed a disk-througput (for each disk) of roughly 14 MB/s, the RAID0-throughput only had 18 MB/s. Of course the theoretical maximum of 28 MB/s will never be reached, we have other mainboards with the same disks that perform a lot better than 18 MB/s. It turns out that that particular mainboard (has a via-chipset, don't know which make though) cannot transfor more than 20 MB/s from all controllers at one time...

This being said, your techie is still wrong !
Our system gives no errors, just has limited bandwith.


Jörg

[Patrick]

Different ways of saying things.

Jörg, you're much more polite than Wombat.

[VJ]

Thank you...

But it might be due to the fact that Wombat has more experience in this field : one's threshold for "stupid techies" tend to lower the more you get in contact with them...
(I'm currently in the stage where I laugh at them; give me another couple of years, and I'll probably respond in a similar way as Wombat... )


Jörg

[Wombat]

Bad advice is one thing, but I don't have any tolerance for <I>paying</I> for bad advice. Just as bad is when some clueless tech support stands between me and fixing the problem.

I wasn't really this bitter until after I had to deal with @Home tech support.

[Sasq]

I've had to deal with Similar tech support, you spend half an hour on the phone (or more), them telling you that your settings must be wrong. Then 25 mins later your get a mass mail appoligising but your local mail server was down....

I've been quite lucky here in Japan tho, probably more related to the fact I'm >25kg heavier then any of the tech support guys I have to deal with

An amusing cartoon can be found Here

Dan