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Digital DJ

Posted: Thu Jan 29, 2004 12:16 pm
by Dj G
Last July I built 2 identical systems:
Based on the Via M10000 MB 1 ghz with 1 ghb ddr dram and 2 200 gig HD's each with ESI 192M soundcards. Elo touchscreen (15") and mini vik rollout keyboard. win2k and PCDJ red 5.3

one main/one backup
only see the internet for service packs. No surf or email.

here's the interesting hitch....
every once in a while the drives check themselves out on boot and re- index(?) songs to not match the titles or removes much of the song file.
I lose 10-20 songs at a clip. (yes, I have the originals)

anyone else having a similar experience?

Posted: Thu Jan 29, 2004 12:34 pm
by julius
sounds like your hard drive controller or hard drives are flaking. i dunno really though, i'm just making stuff up.

Posted: Thu Jan 29, 2004 11:27 pm
by Toon Town Dave
It sounds like a software problem, whatever software does the indexing (PJDJ?) is borken. Check if there is a patch/update/fix or if it is a known issue. Contact their support people if you can't find anything, they're the best bet with commercial software.

Also, I'd roll W2K back to about service pack 3 or 2. They started adding more DRM stuff in 4 and that might be messing things up. If the system is run stand-alone (never networked), and is stable with the old service packs then there is no need to upgrade. I still run SP3 because I don't agree to some clauses in the SP4 license and my system is pretty stable.

If there was a hardware problem, you'd probably see the system crashing, blue screens or other weirdness.

Posted: Mon Feb 09, 2004 8:38 am
by Dj G
Toon Town Dave wrote:
Also, I'd roll W2K back to about service pack 3 or 2. They started adding more DRM stuff in 4 and that might be messing things up. If the system is run stand-alone (never networked), and is stable with the old service packs then there is no need to upgrade. I still run SP3 because I don't agree to some clauses in the SP4 license and my system is pretty stable.

If there was a hardware problem, you'd probably see the system crashing, blue screens or other weirdness.
One did lose the NTDLR file and had to be reinstalled.
So, you think the SP4 did it?

I've been asking around PCDJ boards and no one else has had this problem.

I can't trust the files for a live performance at this point.

Posted: Mon Feb 09, 2004 12:46 pm
by falty411
Id say to buy a mac

that's just SO helpful.

Posted: Tue Feb 10, 2004 8:07 am
by Dj G
falty411 wrote:Id say to buy a mac
I've even heard of "rotten apples" but that adds nothing to this issue as well.

According to a reply on the PCDJ fxusers.com board (so far):
the MBR has been corrupted and the entire HDD needs to be reformatted again.

Posted: Wed Feb 11, 2004 11:25 am
by Drew
I've heard of more broken Windows than rotten Apples.

Posted: Wed Feb 11, 2004 11:34 am
by Mr Awesomer
With a ratio of about 32:1, of course you have.

Re: that's just SO helpful.

Posted: Wed Feb 11, 2004 2:30 pm
by julius
Dj G wrote: According to a reply on the PCDJ fxusers.com board (so far):
the MBR has been corrupted and the entire HDD needs to be reformatted again.
if your master boot record is being corrupted, you need to find that problem. most likely the OS is corrupt and is writing bogus data to the drive. but if you're reformatting the whole hard drive, you need to reinstall the OS again (assuming you store the music on the same disk as the OS) anyway.

Posted: Wed Feb 11, 2004 7:14 pm
by Toon Town Dave
If the NT loader is getting corrupted repeatedly, I'd still suspect hardware.

First, make sure all the fans are working, the heatsinks are making good contact with the CPU or video chips and are not hot (they should be warm). Overheating processors can cause very bad things to happen that are not immediately obvious.

Next, check the RAM. Use something like memtest86 (I think that's the one) or something that does a thorough test, more than just the boot time "test". Bad RAM is quite common although you'd probably see lots of other problems with bad RAM.

Finally check the power supply. I've heard of strange things happening with flakey power supplies. There may be a utility for your MB that will show you the voltages and temperatures or various parts of your system.

Short of that, maybe a bad disc but that's doubtful, they don't usually die and un-die. I really don't think it's a software problem.