-9073 Errors after adding 120GB drive to system.

[Sickstring420]

Well this is my first post in a long time (couldn't remember old password and username - what does that tell ya). I have been a long time Pro Tools user and have all the tweaks and I am running a 001 system with a Digimax (loving those pre's). I record at 48Khz at 24 bit to give me the greatest definition when mixing down and dithering. My system was working great for quite some time with no problems what so ever!!

UNTIL...

I just recently installed a Maxtor 120GB drive and partioned off 2GB for a website and graphics files (more band stuff I work on at the studio). Due to the large drive size I used the quick format option. I was getting -9073 errors all over the place from the start and discovered that the IDE was set to IPO, changed it to DMA and the problem went away for the most part. The problem is that as I am adding more audio tracks it is rearing it's ugly head again. I only have 8 mono and one stereo track with no plug-ins and I am still getting the errors. This system is completely tweaked out and I had no problems before the larger drive swap. The previous drive was formatted using FAT32 at 32K cluster sizes and this one was formatted NTFS at 64K cluster sizes. My system is a custom built and follows the specs for a previous Allenstein machine. I never had problems before this and could always count on my system while tracking and mixing, never a crash or error while playing or recording back and I used a DAE buffer setting of 2 and even could get away with 0 with low track counts. Now I have to use 4 and I got stopped several times last night while recording and trying to bounce rough mixes, pissed off my client's considerably. Has anyone else had a similar problem like this? Is it the 64K cluster? Is the drive to large and needs to be partioned into smaller sizes? Thanks for the help. I have always found my answer on the DUC and the people here are of a great help, but this time I couldn't find any info to really nail down my problem, thanks again.

[Cliffy_Boy]

Hi
The first thing I would try is reduce my recording allocation time from unlimited to the song length - 5 minutes or so. On a larger drive this would reduce the area allocated for the files and reduce the time to seek.

[Sickstring420]

I will try that, but will that help after the tracks have been recorded as well. I can understand how it would benefit before, thanks for the help. Also, in the past I read that with PT 5.0 that you shouldn't defrag the drive since the audio files are directly linked to the sector information and it will impair PT, has this been changed in the more recent versions or was I mislead?

[ii88tek]

It looks like the -9073 error has a long and illustrious history with PT. Look at the Digidesign answerbase here:

http://answerbase.digidesign.com/str...EARCHTEXT=9073

At least this should give you a good place to start. Good luck.

[Sickstring420]

Well I have tried everything you guys are talking about, but still nothing. Do you think the problem is due to using a quick format instead of a full one? I am really at a loss as to what I should do. I set the record allocation to 10 mintues, should I copy these sessions to new sessions and have them rewrite to the hard drive and delete the old ones, would that fix it? I don't understand it worked fine when the hard drive was a 30GB and now with the new 120GB installed I can't even mix without a DAE setting of at least 8 for the buffers. Please help! Anyone else have any ideas!

Oh yeah, I checked the drive and it shows 0% fragmentation, so it's not fragmented.

New drive just installed:
Seagate Barracuda 120GB drive
7,200 RPM drive Utra ATA 100 with 8.5 ms seek time

Old drive removed:
Maxtor 40GB
7,200 RPM drive Ultra ATA 133 with <10ms seek time (per spec sheet)

I am starting to think this is my problem and I should keep the 120GB drive for backing up older sessions and use the 40GB for recording the audio. I have another 120GB Seagate drive, should I use round robin and does anyone think that would resolve my problem?

[ii88tek]

It might be worth a try to reformat your drive with a FULL format instead of quick. I never load a new operating system or use a new drive without a full format, but this could just be from my own superstition. Besides, you stated that the problem was occurring during the formating. It can't hurt.

[ii88tek]

A search of the Microsoft Knowledge Base gave me this result....

"When you choose to run a regular format on a volume, files are removed from the volume that you are formatting and the hard disk is scanned for bad sectors. The scan for bad sectors is responsible for the majority of the time that it takes to format a volume.

If you choose the Quick format option, format removes files from the partition, but does not scan the disk for bad sectors. Only use this option if your hard disk has been previously formatted and you are sure that your hard disk is not damaged."

Thus, the reason I always do a FULL format on new drives.

[nikki-k]

If you run a Sandra on your system (profile), saved as HTML (option in the menus), zip it, and then send it via email with a note in the email as to the name of the zip file and contents, I can give it a look to see if anything is out of place. Check the HTML file Sandra spits out to be sure no private info is in there (shouldnt be).

Once that is done, it would be easier to pinpoint a possible cause.

[Sickstring420]

Well I formatted the drive (took over two hours!) and it worked for playback, but during recording with playback on 9+1 stereo and recording a 10th stereo. I got the dreaded 9073 DAE error and recording halted mid riff (crap..), that's it! I have had it, I am putting my old Maxtor 30GB UATA 133MB drive back in and reformatting it, hopefully this resolves the problem. The Seagate 100MB ATA interface just doesn't seem to have enough throughput and I have to get recording back on track (no pun intended). Will let you know how it goes, thanks for all the suggestions! Oh yeah, where can I get Sandra, is it a diagnostic utility?

[Roy Howell]

Ss420,

This may or may not be the cause, but.......Make sure your new drive is set to DMA and not PIO mode. Go to DeviceMgr./IDE ATA/right click on the new drive/Advanced...there you'll see how it's set. If it's set to PIO, you'll need to set it to DMA.

-Roy


From a previous thread by The Neophyte:

"After spending some time configuring my system to address H/W buffer errors, I thought I would share some interesting points which could easily be overlooked, while tweaking your configurations.

In the Pro Tools documentation it says to check that 'Use DMA if available' is selected. However there is something else, which needs to be emphasised. It is just not good enough to check this alone. One also needs to check that the hard drive in question is actually using DMA mode and not 'PIO'. This is a very important point, and this is the reason why...

I had recently upgraded to Windows XP and for some reason it was showing that my OS Hard Drive was using PIO. I couldn't change this either because it was greyed out for some peculiar reason. My hard drive was an ATA100 which easily supports DMA mode 5. So although the setting said 'Use DMA if available', for some reason XP was using PIO. I was not sure if it was like this prior to my upgrade to Win XP, so I decided to 'roll-back' the driver to the previous (which you can do in XP). This seemed to have resolved the issue. So in the process of upgrading to Win XP, it had forced the hard drive to using PIO, when indeed it was set to 'Use DMA if available'. This may also apply if installing Win XP from scratch. It beats me why XP was doing this, but it was the reason behind the H/W buffer errors. I had assumed that DMA would be used just because of the 'Use DMA if available' setting, when infact this was not the case. I hope this makes sense.

SO, the moral of the story is DON'T just check if it says 'Use DMA if available', but check ALSO that your drives are indeed using DMA and not defaulting to 'PIO'. You should be able to see what is 'actually' being used just below the 'Use DMA if available' box. Win XP was the culprit here.

-Neo"