-6031 errors, clicks and pops

[NAWAR]

hey everyone .

i may have cracked this issue, well i would like to believe that i have at least found the reason and a possible fix.

i had the same issue, my old Asus P5Q died, well it stopped working with any HDD, so it was a sign of what's to come.

trying to avoide doing a FULL upgrade, i found a new Gygabite Motherboard that supported the 775 socket core2 quad i had.
but only 1 PCI slot.
i thought it's ok as i was using an external magma 4slot chases.

after a fresh install and boot, i had the same error over and over, and found out it was an IRQ issue. as it was sharing the address with the AGP.

and there is no physical or other way of changing the address.
after much failed attempts, changing cables, hard drives, and re-installing windows over and over, i bought another board and an i3 3.1 and 2x2gig DDR3 1333 RAM.
"Asus P8H61-PROV3 v3 Intel Mainboard (B3 Stepping) - 2x DDR3, 6x Sata, Gigabit Lan, L1155 - Intel® H61(B3) Express Chipset"

this had 3 PCI slots.

i installed the Host card on the slot further from the AGP as recommended by Magma.

then booted. and got the same error again.
i found out that the AGP was sharing IRQ address with one of the Accell cards "HD3".
i disabled the serial and parallel ports in the BIOS, but that didn't change anythings. i changed the card order, and that didn't change anything.

so, i uninstalled protools and audio drivers only, and moved the Host card for the chases on to the first PCI slot on the motherboard.

booted up, installed protools 8 "not 8.1", checked the IRQ address, and found out that it is now sharing it with the HD core card instead. that was more promising. so i opened a complex session that worked before.
and checked system usage, all looked ok, waited for the plugins to load and hit play, it was flawless. no issues at all...

reading more about the IRQ sharing done by windows, it appears to by a common thing with AGP and some hardware, specially audio hardware, but windows claim that it allocates the job to the correct hardware automatically!!! well i don't think so lol.

i'm running windows 32bit "i know i know". but this something to consider.
check the IRQ address and see what else is sharing that address "USB, AGP, PCI, HDD..... Etc...." then see if you can relocate it to avoid it sharing that address, specially with Accell cards as it seems.

hope this help ...

now to my next issue ... i tried creating a Norton Ghost image, and now windows can not boot, can not fix boot sector as it's now gone missing ... pppfffttt lol