Sound and HDD

[PauL]

I have two questions.

1. Has anyone had any experience with a Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeMusic 7.1? I would like to know if it good for gaming. I listen to lots of music and play FPS games quiet often. I am planning on getting a SpeedLink Medusa 5.1 ProGamer Edition also.

2. I have a Hard drive from my old computer that I want to use. If I were to plug it into my seconday IDE would it be able to see the drive without any problems.

[jdbnsn]

1. I have a SB X-fi fatality which is close and it has been a bit of a hassle here and there. At one point my comp wouldn't even boot with the card in the PCI slot and I never figured out what exactly was wrong because it seems to be working now in a new motherboard. I went from the fatality back to the on-board sound (which had coaxial and optical connections) and to be honest I think it sounded just as good. I don't know if it is worth the investment. The biggest of all problems in my eyes is Creative's tech support, they don't back their goods well and I have had one creative product after another just die.
As for the hard drive, shouldn't be a problem. Just make sure you have your jumpers set correctly. Remember that the connection at the end of the ribbon is secondary, and the one mid-way is primary then set the jumpers on the hard drives. And some HDD's have a separate setting for Master and Master with slave so just read up on the drive. Otherwise it should work fine.

[fragged]

Remember that the connection at the end of the ribbon is secondary, and the one mid-way is primary

Could someone verify that this is accurate? I thought it was the other way around, which is probbably why I cant get my IDE's working... EVER

Well, nowdays i'm confident building computers from scratch, but never got this bit right :S (I learnt all my skillz by watching and asking friends, so its not a very good foundation of knowlege :()

[klingelton]

righty, the stuff about the ribbon cable. generally speaking the bit on the end is secondary and the middle bit is primary, however there are also jumper settings on the hdd to consider (which are different for just about every different manufacturer) the 3 different settings are always the same. These are cable select, primary and slave.

i would advise against cable select (i can never seem to get this to work properly) and head straight into setting one drive primary (ensuring it's on the correct connection on the ribbon cable) and the other slave. this resolves any conflicts your cmos might have.

the second phase is to make sure the settings on your cmos are correct. set them up to auto detect your drives. if this doesn't work, you'll have to manually put in the cylinders n such on the cmos settings. these can be found written on top of the drive. if they're not then contact the manufacturer. save and exit and cmos should have detected your drive.

now the next stage. if windows has not already made a partition (generally it doesn't) then you will need to set it up.

click start -> control panel -> administrative tools - > computer management

then select disk management. your second drive should show up here. right click your second drive and create a partition and assign it a drive letter. then format your new partition and you're ready to go!

hope that was a help

[PauL]

1. I have a SB X-fi fatality which is close and it has been a bit of a hassle here and there. At one point my comp wouldn't even boot with the card in the PCI slot and I never figured out what exactly was wrong because it seems to be working now in a new motherboard. I went from the fatality back to the on-board sound (which had coaxial and optical connections) and to be honest I think it sounded just as good.

Were you using a 5.1 headset, some people said you won't notice much of a difference beweent on board sound and a sound card with 2.1. Any ways, thanks for the help with guys.

[Airbozo]

Well it depends on the cable whether there is a master or slave connector. Most of the newer cables are setup for cable select and MUST be plugged in properly no matter what the jumper settings or the drive will not be recognized. Usually the cables that matter are marked. It has been my experience that if it is not marked it should be fine to plug either drive into either connector so long as you have the jumpers set to master and slave. Sometimes the cables are marked with different colored connectors. And yes on those cables there is also the end that MUST be plugged into the motherboard.

[jdbnsn]

Were you using a 5.1 headset, some people said you won't notice much of a difference beweent on board sound and a sound card with 2.1. Any ways, thanks for the help with guys.

Nope, this was with THX logitech 5.1 system. They sounded great with both onboard and SB, go figure.

[Razors Edge]

I too have a SB X-fi Fat1lity. I have had no problems with it. Alot of problems are due to power problems. The best part is that it gives you Sourround Sound on headphones

[jdbnsn]

I too have a SB X-fi Fat1lity. I have had no problems with it. Alot of problems are due to power problems. The best part is that it gives you Sourround Sound on headphones

To be fair, I never did isolate the problem in the SB vs some other origin so the problems I had may have been unrelated. I have never tried the headphones thing, I'll have to check that out. One thing that I failed to mention earlier that is a benefit to owning a SB is that you have way more options for audio adjustment and features galore that just aren't there with on-board. So may be worth it if you like to tweak.

[PauL]

Okay well I am a noob about hard drives so I have a couple more questions. What is a particion?

Is there anyway I can move my OS onto the drive without reinstalling and have the comp boot from that drive?

[Airbozo]

Paul, A partition is a _logical_ division of the drive. Usually most systems have 1 partition, except some systems (such as dells) that have 2 partitions one for windows and one for the disk image (off topic).

There is a way to move your windows p[artition to another drive but it is a little complicated and if not careful you could lose all of your data. There is another thread here that concerns moving the data to the new drive. I will search for it and post the link here.

Here it is:

http://www.thebestcasescenario.com/forum/showthread.php?t=4290&highlight=move+windows+drive

[jdbnsn]

Partition means divide or separate, by setting up a partition on a HDD you can essentially create two (or more) functional drives on one HDD, so windows will assign drive letters for each partition and it will look like you have two drives instead of one. There are many ways to do this, but if there is data on the drive already that you don't want to lose don't start anything until you have copied it elsewhere. As for the OS, you want to move you OS from your primary HDD to your secondary? I'm not sure I understand, I'm sure you can copy from one drive to another when they are both hooked up and assign the secondary drive as the boot drive in BIOS, but I have never tried and frankly don't see the point. It's usually easier to re-install and I almost gauruntee less problematic.

[luciusad2004]

Sorry to bring the thread back if it was dead but, i also thought that you were supposed to put your primary drive on the end of the cable.

I have a thermaltake ide cable and it has the pull tabs on the end. On each tab it says which drive it is supposed to be connected to and it says the primary drive should be connected to the end.

I have this cable http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16812183033

[Airbozo]

Sorry to bring the thread back if it was dead but, i also thought that you were supposed to put your primary drive on the end of the cable.

I have a thermaltake ide cable and it has the pull tabs on the end. On each tab it says which drive it is supposed to be connected to and it says the primary drive should be connected to the end.

I have this cable http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16812183033

It really depends on the cable. If it is marked follow the marks. If not marked, more than likely it is NOT a cable select cable, then you MUST use jumpers on your drives to select master or slave.

jdbnsn is correct about re-installing. it is usually the better way to go although very time consuming as you have to re-install everything. Ever since I started using windows I have found it necessary to re-install at least once a year to keep my system running perfectly. Re-installing eliminates most problems I have ever had with windows.