crashing problems....help!!

If ya using a Win9x OS read this as it may help
www.pcscoop.com/software/oses/WINfiles/index.asp

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yah im sorry i should have put more detail! ok here we go, im running win98se, i have a voodoo3 3000 agp in my agp slot, sb live value, and a linksys nic card. Thats all im running. Along with 228mb ram. My settings arent anything special, pretty much all default. Right before it crashes in between file transfers my mouse gets all chunky and slows down from its normal speed. I was told that was a system resourse conflict, but im not for sure. After the mouse chunks it just freezes up and i have no access to anything. Keyboard doesnt work nor mouse, hard boot is necessary. well i hope this can some more, thanks again for your suggestions....

Hmm,

I had a problem once that seemed related to disk io. In device manager when you look at primary and secondary ide channel, are they all set to DMA if available? Are there any devices with 'problems' (yellow triangle or question marks) in device manager?

Do you have more than 1 device on your HDD IDE channel? Is the disk at the furthest point ans set to master (as opposed to slave or CSEL (cable select)? If there is another device - HDD or CD is it set to slave? Good idea to leave the channel clear for the boot disk if you only have 2 or three devices total. Always keep the boot disk as master since it gets priority on the IDE channel.

Okay - in your BIOS, are you seeing the HDD correctly in the IDE detection? Are all channels enabled? Sounds stupid but I had Win2K still running a disabled device (badly) once - stupid things happen.

How did you configure 228Mb RAM? What dimms are you using?

What motherboard are you using and are there any BIOS updates available on the manufacturers website? Often a shipping mobo will have older BIOS revision that would really benefit from a refresh... Saying that it is nice if the board manuf. tells you what changed and why.

Check the MS update pages for recommended releses.

Do you use an antivirus software? Try disabling it then redo the copy again - sometimes AV software causes system issues.

Well - try some or all of that lot and let us know what you find...

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i checked the primary and the secondary master. My cd-rom is on my primary master! ahh! and my hard drive is on my secondary master. I went into bios and found that out but how do i change them around? Do i switch the ide cables physically or can i change it in the bios somehow. Im guessing i'll have to switch the cables, but i want to make sure. This might be the answer to my problem. thanks again

Master plugged into last connector, furthest from board, slave plugged in center, nearer to board....

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On my computer, the master (hard disk) is plugged into the middle connecter, nearest the motherboard, and the slave (CD-ROM) is plugged into the last plug, farthest from the motherboard. Are you sure that is the way yours is plugged in? If so, does the orientation of the drives matter then?

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You have two different problems here from what I can see.

Problem #1: the mouse is sluggish during disk transfers. I had this same problem and the solution is to turn on DMA transfers. From the control panel, go to "Device Manager", and look for the devices labelled "Primary IDE controller" and "Secondary IDE controller". Use right-click and select properties to open a dialog box, one of the tabs should let you set DMA, at least for any hard disks.

Problem #2: IDE master/slave. Just to keep the terminology clear, there is a primary IDE controller and a secondary IDE controller, each of which corresponds to exactly one physical connector on your mobo. On each controller, you can have 0, 1, or 2 devices. If you have 1 device, it must be the master, if you have 2 devices, one must be the master and the other must be a slave. The most reliable way to guarantee that they're configured right is to use the jumpers normally found on the back of the drive units to set the device explicitly to be either a master or a slave, as necessary for your setup. The necessary jumper setting is usually documented with a little diagram right on top of the drive, failing that look at the documentation. There is usually a jumper setting for "cable select", this setting allows the drive to automatically figure out whether to act as master or slave based on where it's connected to the cable. Unfortunately most of us can't figure out which end of the cable is for the master and which for the slave, which is why it's easier and lots safer to explicitly set them.

It's best to have the hard drive on a separate IDE controller from the CD drive, because each IDE *controller* has a separate IRQ (the primary usually has IRQ 14 and the secondary has 15). In this config with two drives *both* drives are set up as masters but on different controllers, each would physically have it's own cable. On my system I also have a Zip250, so I put that on the secondary IDE cable as the master, which means that my CD, which is also on that same IDE cable, is set up to be the slave.