15 Posts

February 28th, 2005 22:00

The delay effect is affecting all sounds. Including mp3's, or window sounds from incoming chat, or email notifications. The CD-ROM is set as master and the IDE hard drive is set to slave and the jumpers are correct. I want to swap master/slave on them but I'm having a hard time reaching into the dip switch for the CD-ROM.

41 Posts

February 28th, 2005 22:00

This is delay effect using the CD-ROM audio only,or does effect all sounds (.mid , .mp3's on hard drive)? Also is The CD-ROM and IDE hard drive on the IDE port?

 

Walter

1.1K Posts

February 28th, 2005 23:00

I thought Dell computers use cable select.

4 Operator

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34.2K Posts

February 28th, 2005 23:00

Yes, you should set the jumpers to CS. But this may simply be an artifact of transferring data from the SATA to the IDE bus. Remember, the IDE controller can only read or write to one device at a time. In general, this is a good reason to avoid putting an optical drive on the same controller as a hard drive, but in this case you have no choice.

15 Posts

March 1st, 2005 00:00

Thanks for the advise, I will try to set the jumpers on the IDE HDD to CS. If this is the case, should I also set the CDROM to CS also?
 
 

15 Posts

March 1st, 2005 06:00

This is what I tried this evening:

1) Installed sound card and turned off onboard sound card. Played mp3 from IDE HDD and had no problem. Then copied a mp3 folder from IDE HDD to SATA and the sound got distorted but not as bad as before.

2) Unplugged IDE CD-ROM and changed jumper on IDE HDD to master. Same result, bad sound when transferring data between IDE HDD to SATA. (vice versa is the same fyi..)

3) Set IDE HDD as master and IDE CD-ROM as slave and result was same.

Its getting frustrating. I don't think this is the norm as I have read many posts where SATA HDD should function with IDE HDD. I want to resolve this. A friend of mine suggested that maybe I should change the irq settings on the sound card. Do you think that will help?

My last resort would be to sell my IDE HDD and buy a SATA. But the problem-solving side of me wants to figure this out.

Thanks again.

15 Posts

March 1st, 2005 07:00

To All, thanks for your time. I got it resolved. The culprit was the IDE cable that came with the computer. I swapped it out with another one and everything is fine now.

1.3K Posts

March 1st, 2005 18:00

That kind of makes sense:

Maybe because the CD have low transfer rates compared to HD.   Dell is using single wire cables on the systems since on the 4700,8400 and XPS all the HD are SATA now so the IDE cable is only being used for CD's.

The new cable would of been double wire for 66/100/133 transfer rate.  

 

 

15 Posts

March 1st, 2005 19:00

You are right Tom. It wasn't a faulty IDE cable. I swapped the 40 pin cable which is sufficient for CD-ROM with a 80 pin cable that came with my HDD.
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