Weird Dimension 9200 problem

I went to watch a bunch of recorded HD shows this morning and almost all of
them are a mess.

Started doing the typical debugging and discovered a problem with my new
Dimension 9200s (both have the exact same problem).

If you run HDTune, it should show a consistent 65-75Mbs.

It doesn't.

The graph looks like a mountain range. Every few seconds, the performance
drops to near zero and then pops back up. The 750Gb drives in both machines
(actually one has a 1.5Tb Raid 0 array) work flawlessly in HDTune.

I've neve seen anything like it. I would have assumed a bad drive, but it
happens on both machines.

I'm going to image one over to a 300Gb I have laying around and see if it
still happens. If so, I'd suspect something running in the background, but
what?

I'll call Dell, but can you see explaining this to the script monkeys?

Tom

 

A little more information. I thought the problem could be in something that
is installed by Dell.

It's not.

Formatted and installed XP Pro. Nothing installed except the drivers
(including chipset) and HDTune.

Same problem. Graph dips to almost zero every few seconds.

Cloned the drive to a fresh 300Gb drive.

Same problem. So it is not the drive.

I am beginning to believe there is a design flaw in this machine. The
problem does not occur on drives other than the boot drive, either IDE or
SATA.

It does happen on BOTH 9200 machines that I purchased.

It is a showstopper.

The drive passed the basic diagnostics. I am running the diagnostics from
the diagnostic partition right now.

I've never seen anything like this.

I'll call Dell soon. I can't imagine how they're going to react,
particularly when I want to return both machines.

Tom

 

I would have though it was more likely something in the configuration. to
have 2 machines doing the same thing. Have you saved the tuned channels to
favourites within the options?

 

Not sure what you mean by saved the tuned channels to favorites.

 

Well, just chatted with Dell. Their position was to replace the
motherboard! (on a 3 day old system).

I can't see how that would help since the problem is on BOTH machines. It's
not the hard drive, as I cloned it to another drive and still have the
problem. It's not Sata port 0, as I tried Port 2. It's not the DVD drive,
as I tried it with it unplugged (and turned off in the BIOS).

Weird part is that if just use the second drive I install, it works fine. I
just hate to blow off 250GB.

Tom

 

That's not the problem. It's PVR software. If I record to a second drive I
install, I think it will be just fine, but that's not a solution.

It seems to be a bug in the motherboard, amazingly.

 

What I meant was there must be some way to tune the TV channels to enable
you to record, then save them once tuned in

 

To separate out Windows entirely, try MHDD.

http://hddguru.com/content/en/software/2005.10.02-MHDD/

 

Won't boot to the floppy. Weird.

 

Is it set up as RAID or JBOD?

 

It is set to Raid, although it only has one drive. The only two choices are
Raid and Raid/ATA. The problem is that if I switch, it bluescreens, as the
HAL is built for the current setting.

That said, when I reinstalled, I tried both.

 

Thomas -

You're giving me the heebie jeebies here. You've flashed to the latest BIOS,
correct?


Stew

 

Pssssssst.........

I'm digging on this. My gut feeling is that a new board or even a system
exchange might not do it.

I'll post back if I find out anything.

-Stew

 

I think you're absolutely correct. Especially given that (2) identical
systems are showing the same symptom.....

 

Came with the latest

 

I can't imagine how it would fix anything. If only ONE of the computers
showed the problem, I'd box it up and ship it back. But they BOTH do, which
implies something is wrong.

 

I noticed that the ROM and software for the storage manager is many releases
behind what is available from Intel. Unfortunately, the ROM can only come
from Dell.

 

I'm a bit confused about your problem. I don't have a TV tuner or play HD
movies.

I got a refurb XPS 410 through Dell SB Outlet a month ago. Dell support
thinks it is a 9200 by its service tag number, probably since it came
through Dell SB. It's an E6400 with 250 GB drive, Win XP MCE, XP1300 Pro, 2
GB 667 mem, floppy, drive etc.

I managed to hose Win XP after I had it two days. I couldn't even do a
Cntl F11. Tech support (at 10PM EST my time) had me reload Windows from the
CDs. He first thought it might be a hard drive problem so we did diagnostics
and checked the BIOS.

When I got to the SATA operation he had me change it from "SATA On" to the
"Autodetect" setting even though the default setting is SATA on. According
to his script the RAID should be off unless you running RAID. Later I had
one more question and when I called Tech Support I spoke to a guy in Ottawa,
Canada. He said leave it off also.

Also, has the business with the ATI X1300Pro memory been resolved? From
everything that I have looked at the X1300Pro has 256MB of on-board memory.

Rich

 

Ignore the TV recording. The issue is just HD throughput.

Would you do me a huge favor and go to www.hdtune.com and download their
utility? Run it on your primary drive and see what the graph looks like?

Should be pretty close to a straight line, right around 65. If you have the
same issue I do, it will have huge dips, almost to zero, every few seconds.

For normal use, email, etc., you would NEVER notice this. It is only
because I need a nice clean data stream that it causes me problems. I need
up to 40GB per hour.

Works fine on the second drive.

Thanks,

Tom

 

Tom:

When I first noticed your problem earlier today I down loaded hdtune and ran
it. I just ran it again.

I have a WD2500KS (16MB cache) that I bought and loaded from scratch.

The transfer rate starts at 62.1 MB/sec and drops to 34.2 at 100% (what ever
100% is). Average is 52.9

The Access time is 18.8 ms, the burst is 133.6 and CPU usage is 2.5%

There is only one dip, right after the beginning.

However!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

When I first just ran now it I had OE 6 up with your message and the dips
were happening all the time. When I closed OE 6, and restarted hdtune, only
the one dip at the beginning which I saw the first time I ran it earlier
today shows up.

Rich