No Plextor C2 detection

[bhoar]

Re: More Plextor C2 Weirdness

Which firewire host chipset and bridge chipsets were being used?

-brendan

[pls1]

Re: No Plextor C2 detection

Oxford 911 and 924 for the bridges on the two different add on enclosures. Not sure what the Plextor UF enclosure uses. Texas instruments for the 1394a on all MOBOs

I don't have the two different brands of 1394a/b add-in cards installed on any machines at the moment so I don't know and the chips do not have a logo.

Phil

[pls1]

Update Partial Explaination: No Plextor C2 detection

On the RAID MOBO machine I noticed PLextools ProXL had a background process running. I killed it and now dbpoweramp can detect C2 errors with the internal PX 755 drive where before dbpoweramp could not detect them.

BUT NOW, dbpoweramp CANNOT detect C2 Errors with the USB connected PX-760 (via an external IDE enclosure) to the RAID MOBO machine where before with PlexTols ProXL running in background dbpoweramp would detect C2 over USB.

I still can't get Firewire C2 detection in any configuration.

Fortunately, on the rebuilt IDE machines with Plextor ProTools XL running, dbpoweramp detects C2 errors on both internal IDE PX-760 drive as well as the USB connected 760 drive that I moved over from my RAID MOBO machine.

Another great Sunday afternoon of computer maintenance. I'm sticking to two dedicated IDE machines with clean XP installs, only dbpoweramp, browser and security software with two different models of Plextors for my 5000+ CD ripping project.

Phil

[pls1]

Final Thoughts on No Plextor C2 detection

I did a little more fiddling on some additional machines and I think that similar loss of C2 detection by dbpoweramp can be caused by some Creative, Roxio and Ulead tool configurations on RAID MOBO's. Pure IDE MOBO's seem to be immune (but I'd still be paranoid since I did not do extensive testing).

I guess the moral is, any funny behavior on C2 detection by dbpoweramp requires a machine clean of other DVD and CD tools to accurately troubleshoot. It's not just a Demon Tools problem. Second, IDE machines have more predicable behavior than newer MOBO's.

Perhaps some FAQ or documentation update somewhere is called for since most new machines will not be IDE and most come with some flavor of media software.

Phil

[bhoar]

Re: Final Thoughts on No Plextor C2 detection

Phil -

Go into the system control panel (shortcut: windows-key + Pause/Break-key), then the hardware tab, then the Device Manager. Find your optical drive in the tree (e.g. DVD/CD-ROM drives, or something similar, open up that node, then find your drive by model number). Double click on it. In the popup box go to the Detail tab. Click on the drop down and find any entries that include "...Upper Filters" or "...Lower filters". For example, mine has four entries: "Device Upper Filters", "Device Lower Filters", "Class Upper Filters" and "Class Lower Filters".

One or more of the entries may have one or more filters installed. For example, on this thinkpad T60p with a plethora of burning, ripping and disc robotic software installed, I coincidentally see one filter driver per category:

"Device Upper Filters"
redbook
"Device Lower Filters"
imapi
"Class Upper Filters"
GEARAsWDM
"Class Lower Filters".
PxHelp20

The first two found are probably the normally installed microsoft filter drivers. The last two found are from third-party software. It is has been shown that some third party filter drivers can lead to problems both with device feature detection/testing as well as proper operation of these features in CD ripping (and in other areas). I haven't recently checked to see if the ones I have installed on this machine (a work machine) are problematic for ripping, however.

It might be worth checking these issues across your working and non-working machines / devices.

-brendan

[pls1]

Re: No Plextor C2 detection

Thanks for your help.

All the machines WITHOUT Class Upper or Class Lower filters work as per your recommendation (I've given up on Firewire). SOME of the machines with Class Filters work, for example the Plextor supplied Ulead Blu-Ray burner for the Plextor B900A installed in the 755 instance.

However, the filters from Plextools ProXL interfered with the internal 755 drive on C2 but ENABLED C2 via USB on a 760 in an Oxford Chip set enclosure.

I'm done futzing around since I'm almost done building my three identical dual P4, 3GHz, IDE ripping machines with optical USB connections (already tested for C2 detection). Two machines go in the machine cage and the dual Plextor (760 and 230) enclosures go by the office chairs or my study. Remote desktop works fine and I can use my workstation or laptop to control the machines via wireless or Ethernet connection since I run my business out of one side of my house.

The third machine will be internal IDE on a cart, primarily for processing discs that need polishing to try to recover errors.

Again I suggest this is probably worthy of a FAQ since audio-enthusiast but non-geek users are going to have pre-installed media software on their machines that can interfere with dbpoweramp and hence a potentially lost sale and good word of mouth for an excellent product.

Now to focus on perfecting my work flow for 5000+ classical CDs.

Phil