BSD problem

[winger]

I have an occasional problem with scope hanging and using %100 of a cpu and then the system crashing with Blue Screen of Death.

I have a MSI 785 mb with dual core AMD, 2 gig memory.
I have 15dsp scope, 6 dsp pulsar and and 6 dsp srb installed.
I am using usb 2 midi man devices, usb wireless keyboard and mouse, 2 7 inch usb displays and a usb touch on a 15 in monitor. (lost of usb).

The device manage says the pulsar cards have their own interrupts but the 15dsp scope card share irq with ide disk controller.
The MB has only 3 pci slots so other that swapping around the cards order, I eliminate the sharing of an irq with scope.

I think my power supply is 450 watt. I was thinking maybe replacing it with a larger one.

The problem is guaranteed to occur if I leave the system up long enough. Like over night. I have had it do it after about 7 hours.
It is not a heat problem, the dsp chips are cool to the touch when it happens.

I've this has been discussed before.

Is the power supply update likelyt ot help? I was thinking 650watt, enough? Any suggestions?

[garyb]

go to the device manager, find the card, right click choose "properties", make sure that "reset board if idle" is unchecked.

[winger]

Thanks Gary, it was was set.
We'll know tomorrow if it resolves the problem.

[YISH313z]

Lol. I bought a whole new computer because I was having the same issue. After waking up with the pc running overnight, scope would not reepond at times and when trying to close out the scope app...BSOD. sure enough "reset board if idle" was checked. Makes sense now.

[winger]

It ran through the first night ok. I had to head out of town and decided to leave it running over the weekend. "The big test". If it makes it until Sunday we'll know. This is great. Use it for live sound, my own and others. In the last year I have had it crash 2 times during a show. Hopefully, I will never have to sweat it again wondering if it is going to crash on me.

Thanks Gary. I had seen talk about this rest if idle before but had not made the connection with my problem.

[winger]

Problem still not solved tho it seem better. I cleared the bin on Wednesday evening and all was good until 3:15PM on Saturday and BSOD. So it went 3 full days without a problem but still crashed. I don't think I ever went more that 12 hours before.

Any other ideas?

It is back up running now so I am watching for the next BSOD.

[garyb]

restart the computer before 3 days pass.

test the memory.

try another power supply.

try another video card.

[winger]

>restart the computer before 3 days pass.

If it only happens after 3 days, this solution is ok. I use it live and normally don't run beyond 14 hours at a time.

>test the memory.

Do you have a recommended memory test suite?

>try another power supply.

that was my next thought.

>try another video card.

The video is built into the mother board, but if all else fails I will try this.

[garyb]

i believe that memtest is one of the most popular memory checkers...

[winger]

I' put a new power supply in. A corsair 600 watt 80% +.
Turns out my power supply was a 350w not 450w.
Downloaded memtest, 2hours and running. 4 passes complete, no errors yet.

I'll load everything up again tonight and see how long things run now.

[winger]

Even with the new porwer suply and the reset if idle it cleared I still get the hangs/dsod. The first one after the power supply replacment took about 24 hours, but I got a second after about 8 hours. That is not enough.

I just put in another video card. I have a pci-x 16 card laying around. I am backup waiting for results again.

The scope device drivers are version 5.0.9.5 and I am running windows 7, 64 bit. Not sure which version of scope I have. Registry says I have both 5.0 and 5.1 scope application for the scope card. Is this the latest version device driver?

[garyb]

i seriously doubt if it's Scope. there's only one 64bit Scope driver.

bluescreen usually = bad hardware.

[winger]

Every time I have actually seen the BSOD occur, the scope application went to 50% cpu untilization before the crash. This is a dual core processor which means one of the cores is running 100% for scope. This implies to me scope software is somehow part of the problem(caught in a tight loop), either scope drivers or scope windows code.

Could it be a 64 bit problem? I have scope installed on 2 other systems, but the others have simple projects with a single 15 dsp scope card bot both are 32 bit os. I am thinking about setting up a 32 bit boot on the one failing to see it that is the problem.

[garyb]

the Scope application or driver may be triggering the event, but it's not likely to be the reason. are you setting processor affinity? if so, why? it's not necessary.

there are no compatibility problems with Scope and windows 7 32 or 64bit, in general(besides STS samplers...). Scope is nearly 100% stable here.

[winger]

No, I have not messed with affinity.

I guess we'll see if the problem continues now that I have switched from the mother board video to a plugin video card.

[winger]

Still crashed. I'm running out of thinks to try. (memory,power supply, video card,).

Could ti be because the scope card shares an IRQ with the disck controller?
Are there any chipset issues? I have north bridge 785G/78-G and South bridge NB750/SB710 chipsets. (MSI mother board).

I have another system with an ASrock MB that has AMD880G chipset. This system is running a simpler setup, the scope card an a pulsar I. Ift also had no usb stuff and I don't use midi at all. I have never seen it crash but I don't know for sure it won't if it had the same setup. I could try this MB, but as a last resort.

Any more suggestions?

[garyb]

that might be the cause of the crash(the shared controller irq), but that would indicate a faulty motherboard.

Scope cards are realtime products. minor defects that other systems won't care about will make trouble for Scope cards.

[winger]

I am rebuilding my system using another motherboard. This one is a ASrock and all three of the pci slots (scope cards) not get their own irq.

I started with a new install of windows 7. It will probably be a few days before I have the system completely reinstalled and configured the same as it was with the old MB so it will be a while before I know if problem is resolved or not.

[winger]

still have the problem.

Have replaced the power supply, mother board, memory and memory. Unchecked reset if idle. I even switched for windows 7 64bit to 32 bit. Still get the same result. The new mother board has all no shared IRQ's for the scope cards.

Things work for a while, this time it was maybe 18 hours. When I clicked on the scope project(anywhere) it became non-responsive and I had 1 core at 100%. Sometimes I can kill scope with task manager, and restart ok. Other times it will bsd when I kill it. If I don't kill it it will BSD after a little while.

I suppose I could have a problem with one of the scope cards. I could swap in other pulsar cards, but I only have 1 5.1 license for 1 15 dsp scope care, so I cant swap in one of my others with reinstalling. (my other 2 scope cards have 5.0 licenses).

[winger]

I have had a suspicion all along that this is related to midi in scope. I am working on this as a live mixer using devices I built using BCF2000 as a control surface. I wrote c++ program that maps midi controllers in from the surfaces to controllers to scope via pci midi.

The c++ program tracks all midi changes from both the controller and scope and I can save and restore full snap shots of the system. So instead of saving and restoring my project for presets, I can load and store via midu. It takes maybe 2 seconds to load a full mix into scope and position all faders. There are more that 1000 controllers sent.

My last crash things were running along fine, i was playing music via media player and moving controls. All was cool. Then I saved the current preset, and loaded a different one. Instant hang of scope. As I said before this only happens after the system is running for quite some time (several hours).

I am not sure it is midi related because I have had it do this with no activity *that I know of) at all. I just have my suspicions about the midi drivers. Note that when sending a snap shot I am sending midi data as fast as I can. I had to put pauses in the load because scope would loose data if I did not stop and wait. My guess there is a buffer size limit and if I send too much without a pause scope buffers fill and I loose stuff.

Is it possible I scope is having problems if I over run of the midi buffers in the device driver?