Topic: CD/DVD Drive issues

[Scooter]

ya, before you buy any new hardware, I'd backup and reformat if it was me...  That would eliminate the software side of things for sure before moving on buying more hardware.

[dmonterisi]

i would love to do that.  however, the fact that the drives don't work make it awfully hard to save everything in order to reformat.  it's a chicken and egg kinda problem.

[dnsacks]

could you clear enough space on one of the drives to create a new partition to load a fresh install of winxp into?  Then, once running you could delete the old OS stuff and still have your non-os-realted programs available.

Or, get a new drive, install it as the master IDE drive and relagate one of your current drives to a usb2/firewire external enclosure.  Sounds like the only real way out of this for you will be a fresh os install.

Darrin

[Scooter]

I C.  Can you network to another puter in the house and dump all your data to that box, then reformat??  How bout swapping in another hard drive you may have laying around to get up and running, then see whats up. Have you tried booting up from floppy into DOS, and seeing if you can eccess your drives that way (unless they are NTFS of course).  There are some nice boot cd's here http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/ if you are so inclined.  I use the pebuilder all the time, it's essentially XP that runs off the cd drive.

[dmonterisi]

i have 2 physical drives (1 80 gig and 1 120 gig).  each is partitioned into 2 partitions.  on the bigger one, one of those partitions is a wavelab partition where i keep only music files that i'm currently working on (like 25 gigs).  a lot of this stuff is already stored on dvd so i can delete some of it and move the rest of it to another partition and use this partition to install a fresh version of windows on.  now, i should still be able to access the other partitions from this install of windows, correct?  then, i'll just do an install with very minimum stuff, try and get everything off the computer and re-install everything fresh.  does that make sense?

thanks for everyone's help.

[Scooter]

that would work if the big drive is the master.  I think that windows has a prob booting form the slave HD??  But you could always switch the jumpers around and then do it if it doesn't want to install to slave.

[dmonterisi]

the big one is the slave.  the second partition on the master has a lot of 24bit music that i don't want to have to redownload or i would just install it there.

i'm not at all excited about this project...ain't gonna be no fun.  but it will be good in the long run, i think. 

[dnsacks]

what about x-fering the 24 bit files on the master's second partition to the second partition on the slave?

[dmonterisi]

so, while i got y'all's attention, what's the optimal way for me to set up my system?  2 drives (1 80 gig and 1 120 gig).  the most important uses are (in order):

-photo editing (photoshop)
-music-related (wavelab, discwelder, etc)

photoshop is a ginormous resource hog, should i set up a dual boot with a photoshop optimized setup?  1 partition for solely storing music, 1 for solely storing photos?  so would that be 4 partitions with 2 xp installs, with the second xp install with basic components and photoshop?

[dmonterisi]

what about x-fering the 24 bit files on the master's second partition to the second partition on the slave?

i could probably do that...then doing a fresh install on that partition...makes sense.

[Scooter]

so, while i got y'all's attention, what's the optimal way for me to set up my system?  2 drives (1 80 gig and 1 120 gig).  the most important uses are (in order):

-photo editing (photoshop)
-music-related (wavelab, discwelder, etc)

photoshop is a ginormous resource hog, should i set up a dual boot with a photoshop optimized setup?  1 partition for solely storing music, 1 for solely storing photos?  so would that be 4 partitions with 2 xp installs, with the second xp install with basic components and photoshop?

That prolly would work fine.  I have mine set up similarly;  One partition for net stuff, one partition for audio stuff (no net), these are set up as dual boot,XP on both.  Then two other partitions are for storage.

[dmonterisi]

i'm thinking about using my Ipod as a temporary storage solution...this shouldn't be a problem should it?  i have like 40 gigs worth of photo stuff that I don't want to lose that i could throw on my ipod and then transfer back later.

[dmonterisi]

from the custom build thread in the open forum, i'm considering just building a new machine, here's that post:

ok, so as some of you saw in the comp thread, i'm having all sorts of trouble with my machine.  it's over 3 years old at this point and it's been pretty much a turtle in dealing with the hi-res photo processing i've been doing.  the files that come out of my 8 mpixel camera are huge to deal with and process.  a 16bit tif developed from the RAW camera file is 48mb.  it takes 20-25 minutes for my computer to process a batch of 20 RAW images into 16bit tifs.  so i've been thinking about upgrading for a while and given all my computer issues, the time may have come and I think I'm gonna build a machine.  I have 2 HDs in my machine now (120gig and 80gig) that may be harvestable, but i probably won't so that i can get new SATA150 drives in a RAID 0 setup.  I'll probably install the old drives as backup drives.  I will keep my 19" trinitron CRT and the SEK'D Prodif Plus 24/96 soundcard.  Other than that, i doubt i'll use any parts from my current machine.  so i started spec'ing out the parts to build a new machine and here is what i'm currently looking at:

-Intel 925xCVLK motherboard w/i925x & ICH6R chipset - 800 MHZ FSB w/onboard 1gig LAN, 3 x1394 ports and 8xUSB2.0 ports
-Intel P4 640 3.2 GHZ HT CPU w/800 MHZ FSB w/2MB L2 cache
-2 x Kingston 240 pin 1 GB ECC DDR2 PC2-4200 RAM (max combined transfer rate of 8.4GB/s)
-2 x Seagate SATA150 w/NCQ 7200 RPM HD's in a RAID 0 array
-16x NEC dual layer DVD+-RW drive
-Silverstone Black Aluminum Mid-tower case w/7 expansion slots

I priced this out to around $1300 on newegg without really searching for deals yet so i can probably do a little bit better with some looking.  what do you guys think of this setup for high-powered photo editing as the main priority and audio editing and processing as the second priority, and general usage (net, word processing, etc) as the third priority.  would you builid it any different?  is a 10k rpm SATA drive a better option than the RAID 0 array?  I don't have any experience in dealing with RAID setups so any help here would be appreciated.


EDIT: also, if anyone has thoughts on cases, i'd appreciate hearing them, there are way too many to choose from on newegg.