Hardware & Devices

Mattzimmerer6-Jan-10 10:36

6-Jan-10 10:36

Thanks!

fat_boy14-Jan-10 5:35

fat_boy

14-Jan-10 5:35

Mattzimmerer wrote:
my driver

You wrote a driver and you cant get devioctl to work! OMG | :OMG:

Morality is indistinguishable from social proscription

Mattzimmerer14-Jan-10 13:30

14-Jan-10 13:30

Thanks sir, your tons of help. No it works now... maybe you should try helpful comments instead of (in my perception) being boastful. Surely you have asked for help to understand certain things... Obviously in not doing this professionally, its a side project in developing a game hacking tool! Big Grin | :-D

fat_boy15-Jan-10 5:41

fat_boy

15-Jan-10 5:41

I saw though that someone else had solved your problem and felt like having a bit of a dig! Smile | :)

Morality is indistinguishable from social proscription

Mattzimmerer15-Jan-10 14:10

15-Jan-10 14:10

Yea, lol this stuff is pretty out there if you have only been exposed to userspace programming. Now onto assembly language!

[Message Deleted]

Mattzimmerer2-Jan-10 12:06

Re: RtlCopyMemory() question Repost

2-Jan-10 12:06

[Message Deleted]

Richard MacCutchan2-Jan-10 22:11

Richard MacCutchan

2-Jan-10 22:11

Please post your question in one forum only.

How to use HDD's write cache?

chenayang28-Dec-09 22:18

chenayang

28-Dec-09 22:18

Hi all, I would like to check the throughput of the RAID controller and I need to avoid the bottle neck of HDD. So I would like to make sure all the test data is written to HDD's write cache. Could anyone know how to control the data to be written in the cache(not memory cache) only? Confused | :confused:

Dan Neely30-Dec-09 6:00

Dan Neely

30-Dec-09 6:00

You should be able to disable the OS cache; but the behavior inside the HD itself is a black box to anyone outside. The best you can do is to leave the array idle for a while between test runs so that the controller should flush the on board cache and to limit your writes to slightly less than the maximum the cache can hold.

3x12=36
2x12=24
1x12=12
0x12=18

chenayang30-Dec-09 17:34

chenayang

30-Dec-09 17:34

Thanks, Dan. But is there any way to determine which size to write is suitable, i.e. if the HDD's cache is 16MB? I would like to flush the cache first then write some data but if the data is too small the throughput may still too slow. And if writing large data it may be written to disk instead if OS cache is disabled. How can I balance it to keep using the HDD's cache?

Dan Neely31-Dec-09 6:40

Dan Neely

31-Dec-09 6:40

OS cache and the cache on the HD are completely independent. Disabling the former will have no effect on the latter. You'll have to experiment with various sizes to see what happens. I'd hope that the controllers in the drives would use the full xxMB of cache for writes if saving and not hold any in reserve for read use; but I don't know if that's actually the case.

3x12=36
2x12=24
1x12=12
0x12=18

Dave Kreskowiak2-Jan-10 15:15

Dave Kreskowiak

2-Jan-10 15:15

If I understand what you're trying to do, you have one very serious problem. Doing this while running under Windows, any process can use the drive at any time, including during your testing, screwing up the results.

I do believe that you cannot do what you want while running Windows. You'd have to do it under DOS or some other single tasking O/S.

A guide to posting questions on CodeProject[^]

Dave Kreskowiak
Microsoft MVP
Visual Developer - Visual Basic
2006, 2007, 2008
But no longer in 2009...

Long recognition time CD-ROM

Dan Neely3-Jan-10 17:15

Dan Neely

3-Jan-10 17:15

Dave Kreskowiak wrote:
I do believe that you cannot do what you want while running Windows. You'd have to do it under DOS or some other single tasking O/S.

I think you're overstating the difficulty of avoiding problem. I was benching several methods of reading large data files a few weeks ago, and while there were a number of high outliers roughly half to two thirds of the results came within about 30ms on 2.5ish second test runs. It was easy to see which runs got hammered by a different processes IO. (Probably WMP in my case since i was doing it on my dev system while listening to music).

3x12=36
2x12=24
1x12=12
0x12=18

Game Controller

behzad vosughi28-Dec-09 20:56

behzad vosughi

28-Dec-09 20:56

How to interact with the game controller is connected to the usb port in C#?

modified on Tuesday, December 29, 2009 3:02 AM

Re: Game Controller

Dave Kreskowiak29-Dec-09 3:42

Dave Kreskowiak

29-Dec-09 3:42

Google for "XNA Framework".

A guide to posting questions on CodeProject[^]

Dave Kreskowiak
Microsoft MVP
Visual Developer - Visual Basic
2006, 2007, 2008
But no longer in 2009...

Re: Game Controller

dybs6-Jan-10 16:52

dybs

6-Jan-10 16:52

To expand on Dave's response, some USB devices can emulate a COM port, so you can just use the System.IO.Ports.SerialPort class. Otherwise, you may have to import some Win32 API methods (using the DllImport attribute), depending on the device class (HID, CDC, etc). Plus, you'll need to know the format the controller uses to send its data to the PC.

Dybs

The shout of progress is not "Eureka!" it's "Strange... that's not what i expected". - peterchen

Lutosław26-Dec-09 23:23

26-Dec-09 23:23

I know it's a programming website and my question has nothing to do with programming, but I exist in CP for some time and I love the community. Blush | :O

Problem Statement
OK. The problem is: it takes extremely much time to recognize a CD or DVD for my DVD-ROM drive. By extremely long I mean 5-15 minutes. What is interesting, it happens only for the first CD/DVD used from system start. The further insterted CDs are recognized and read much slower than before the problem appeared, but they are recognized at almost normal time.

I suppose is enough information for somebody who knows what's going on. However, here is the background.

Background
1. I messed up IDE cable. I thought that there is a problem with HDD and a "HDD cable" mislead me. In effect, I was plugging/unplugging CD cable and maybe I damaged it.

2. I do not know a model of my CD-ROM. I mean, it is a classical no-name from a computer bought as a whole. I regret buying it that way.

Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

Greetings - Jacek

Roger Wright26-Dec-09 23:52

Roger Wright

26-Dec-09 23:52

There are a couple of things you might try. First off, clean the drive. Get a commercial CD cleaning kit that includes a dummy disk for the drive and give it a good dusting. When the drive tries to read a disk, if it runs into errors it will retry for a while, and it can sometimes take a few minutes. Secondly, check the jumpers on the drives - all of them. A single IDE port/cable is allowed to have 1 or 2 devices attached. Most machines using IDE technology have two ports, each supporting two devices. If you have only one HDD and one CD, the best configuration is to let each be Master (or no selection on the jumpers at all, depending on the manufacturer) of its own cable. If you must use two devices on a port, one must be Master, and the other Slave. Since a CD drive is slower than a HDD, the HDD should always be the Master. In the event that you have two HDDs, put them both on the same cable, and connect the CD to its own separate cable.

One other thing to consider is replacing the cable. If you've damaged it, or you have an old ATA33 cable on a modern IDE port, you're asking for trouble. They're cheap to replace so, given your mention that it might be damaged, you might as well start with this step and see what happens.

"A Journey of a Thousand Rest Stops Begins with a Single Movement"

Lutosław27-Dec-09 3:58

27-Dec-09 3:58

Thank you.

Yeah, I had been "googling" and read about switching jumpers in several forums. I technically know what are jumpers, but I don't have a faintest idea where are they in this specific case. On a motherboard? On a cable? On a CD/HD drive?

I have a single HDD with SATA cable and a single DVD-ROM drive with ATA cable. I consider my PC as modern one (2007).

Greetings - Jacek

Roger Wright27-Dec-09 7:15

Roger Wright

27-Dec-09 7:15

Jacek Gajek wrote:
I have a single HDD with SATA cable and a single DVD-ROM drive with ATA cable

Never mind then, you don't have a jumper issue. The jumpers are important only when you have two ATA drives on a single cable, as one drive must be master, the other the slave. Even this depends on where you live, as many European models use a third position - CS (chip select) - which is rarely used in the US.

I haven't built any machines using SATA drives yet, but I don't believe they require jumpers to work. But since you suspect there might be damage to a cable I'd replace them both, just to be sure. As I mentioned, they're cheap. The DVD-ROM should be given a good cleaning, too, as dirt on the optics commonly causes read errors, which lead to many retries and long delays.

You might also reinstall the DVD-ROM driver software, if it shipped with drivers. Sometimes drivers get corrupted, though I have no idea how that can happen. I've had several HP products fail to respond after months of service, and reinstalling them often restored full function. Use the System applet in Control Panel to access Device Manager, then delete the drive from the list. Then reinstall the software per the manufacturer's directions.

It's also a possibility that the drive itself is failing. I know that sounds unreasonable, but I've had two fail on me in less time. Happily, they no longer cost more than the computer.

The last possible problem I can think of is an ugly one - the drive controller on the motherboard may be failing. I haven't had this happen in a long time, but it does occasionally occur. It used to be possible to buy a drive controller card to bypass the onboard controller, but I haven't seen one of those in years.

"A Journey of a Thousand Rest Stops Begins with a Single Movement"

Lutosław27-Dec-09 8:23

27-Dec-09 8:23

Roger Wright wrote:
Then reinstall the software per the manufacturer's directions

I doubt that a company which sold me this computer knows who is a manufacturer of their DVD drives... It's name is "DVD Multi recorder". Therefore, excluding the step quoted above, I tried all of that.

What's fun, for some time DVD was recognized as FDD. After messing (plugging/unplugging) with ATA cable it wasn't recognized at all. After next messing, the current state has been achieved.

Roger Wright wrote:
It's also a possibility that the drive itself is failing.

It is higly improbable, because it happend just after some risky operations where performed, which wasn't directly related to the drive itself. A fatal coincidence might happen, though (hope not).

Roger Wright wrote:
the drive controller on the motherboard may be failing

Yep that would be ugly. The motherboard is ASUS, though. On the other side, why the hell could it fail in this specific moment?

Thank you for your interest and helpful answers. I will try to find someone who has such cleaning CD and ~~steal~~encourage him to ~~give~~borrow it to me for a ~~year~~day or two.

Greetings - Jacek

Lutosław12-Jan-10 0:06