Hey all,

So I've got a few FLAC files on one hard drive that I transferred to another hard drive by simply 'copy' and 'paste' in windows explorer.

However, now when I try to play these files, in foobar for example, I get tons of decoding errors. I double checked, and the original files (still on the first HDD) play just fine with no errors.

Anyone have any idea what's going on here? Obviously the simple copy and paste is not being executed accurately.

Is there a way to accurately transfer data from one HDD to another?

Thanks,
Guy Smiley

Is your computer overclocked?
Maybe RAM is bad or maybe the hard disk has bad sectors?

Hmmm... very, very slight overclock. Never, ever had a problem in 2 years with it. Its an AMD 2500+ Barton core... stock it runs at 1.8GHz and I've got it at about 1.9 something... ~2GHz. Again, never any instabilities, rock solid.

I'll try running memtest86, and I'll scan the HDDs for bad sectors.
Thanks for the suggestions.

Guy Smiley

I run my 2500+ at 3200+ speed (2.2GHz with a 400MHz FSB - they're basically the same processor but those that run a tad too high in temperature at 3200+ speed were set to a default 333MHz FSB and marketed as 2500+) and have never noticed any problems or (terrible) overheating.

What motherboard/chip-set do you have? There have been reports of data corruption ,copying data between two physical harddrives, on several of the nForce chip sets. I believe the same applies to several other chip-sets as well. Try to upgrade to the latest bios and you could also try to disable dma on you harddrives (Yes, it will slow down a lot) and see if that helps.

/Kef

Could having the two drives on the same port increase the likelihood of errors occuring? This could be a possible explanation, if so.

I've had serious problems like this with my 3 AMD 2500 based computers. No problems so far on my new pentium and the Pentium Laptop.
See this post Flac errors
(I've moved files to and from external USB drives too)

Thanks for the replies!

I'm running an ABIT NF7-S (nForce2 chipset I believe), AMD 2500+, 2 sticks of 256MB Kingston HyperX running in dual mode, and 1 seagate 250G SATA, and 1 seagate 80G IDE drive.

I'm trying to transfer files from the SATA drive to the IDE drive. Both drives are brand new (within last 4 months). The IDE drive is a loaner until I pickup another SATA drive. BUT, since I'm out of space on my 250G and I wanted to start archiving my audio collection to FLAC now, I just figured I'd do it on the 80G until I get the new drive. But seeing as transferring may be a problem, I'm hesitant to spend some serious time archiving.

Thanks Norman for the link to the other thread. I read through that, and now I'm convinced I should get this figured out before I invest any more time archiving!

So if two drives operating normally can't properly swap data, and the ram is good, I guess this is a MB problem? Does anyone know of a good program to test data transfers etc? What about something like sisoft sandra? I've used it in the past, but don't remember the extent of it's capabilities.

Thanks for the help.

Guy Smiley

If the files were verified after encoding and only later corrupted during transfer then I'd suggest there is a problem with your sata controller. It may not like your PCI bus being over-clocked. I'd recommend trying it non-overclocked and if possible to buy/borrow a second IDE drive so you can test if it happens when transfering IDE to IDE.

I don't think this is anything specific to AMD systems, we've got dozens of them here at work and none have any issues like this. Most people couldn't use a computer that corrupts files.

PS. If it corrupts flac files then chances are that it will corrupt any large files. You should test it by transfering a load of wav files and then doing a binary file compare. I'll bet that if it happens with flac it can happen with any file.

First of all this thread is not about Lossless Codecs. It's hardware problem - you will get errors no matter what kind of data you try to copy. Switch to PIO mode instead of UDMA and look if the copying process introduce errors too.

Actually some of 2500+ bartons were actually 3200+ that passed but were simply just labelled as 2500+ [i only found that info about 2 weeks after I brought my 3200+ oh well never mind]

ANy chance it's a read speed problem on the second drive? Bad fragmentations, or USB 1 or something like that?

I find your problem quite disturbing. I wonder if it might be related to either your overclock or the mix of PATA and SATA you have installed.

I have the same motherboard, fitted out with a Thoroughbred 2400+. I have found that when I overclock the CPU speed (even a little) I get unpredictable results on things like encodes (admittedly not on file copies). For example, last night I ran a few Xvid encodes and ended up with two unplayable files. However, upping the FSB to 400 from the stock 266 and reducing the multiplier to maintain the stock 2000mhz results in perfect and much improved performance (an extra 20% on encoding). Perhaps it’s something you could try.

I was considering buying a big SATA drive to add to my system which already has to Seagate PATA drives installed. Now I am thinking twice about mixing them on the same system.

Switch to the standard MS hard drive controller driver if you are using Nforce one. I had problems with Nforce4 chipset + nvidia driver.

This is right. Don't use that Nforce IDE driver.

Right on. Thanks for all of the suggestions! I was hoping to try a few things out this past weekend towards finding a solution, but I somehow accidentally got my wife hooked on Need for Speed MW. When she found out you could change the car colour and such, I was without my computer for the weekend! She played so much yesterday that she was seeing direction arrows in her sleep last night... lol. That'll teach her!

Again, thanks for the suggestions. I've got quite a number of things to try. It may take some time, but when I get this figured out I'll post back on this thread my results, and hopefully the solution to my prob!

Later,
Guy Smiley

Well this is disturbing me too as I'm going to get AN7 (slightly modernized NF7) soon to overclock my 2500+ to 3200+. Could you please run memory test from Microsoft or memtest86+ or Prime95 to see if you get any errors?