CDRom probs (bug?) under WinXP >SOLVED

Fede · Post by **Fede** » Sun Nov 25, 2007 3:14 pm

Hi all, after two weekends of tests, retests, booting and rebooting, I write this to share with all of you ever had similar problems.

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WARNING!!!
All my findings are result of unconfirmed suppositions, so take these assumptions with the necessary doubt and experiment at your own risk.
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I had several problems accessing cds from Windows Explorer and/or SFP or other apps (cd burning etc...).
In details my system was experiencing:
- freezing
- slowdowns
- drives not accessible
- scope not able to read cds if not restarted every time.

Here the things I addressed to made my system behave a little better:

1) SafeDisc driver installed in form of secdrv.sys in windows\system32\drivers\ caused a lot of trouble.
This driver is for protected discs like games or other stuff that requires some sort of authentication of the disc session in order to start correctly. (See on Wikipedia...)
The authentication process slows significantly down the access to drives causing system or apps to hang. (i.e. Explorer takes minutes to show newly inserted discs, it tries and retries to read them but fails several times...)

I disabled this by renaming the driver file (I also modified some registry entries...) and after a reboot things got definitely better, however I cannot play anymore Civilization4 which is responsible for putting a fresh copy of that file in that directory everytime I try to start the game...
...Thanks Civilization4 and my girl friend who gave it to me! ...and also thanks to the people there at MacroVision for fooling our computers this way! This is the way customers are rewarded for buying original stuff!

2) SFP causing drives to misbehave, locking access, some drives not being accessible or some discs readable until SFP is running. After shutting down sfp all is right.
Plus it is not possible to read changed akai cds without restarting sfp.

Thanks to Unlocker (http://ccollomb.free.fr/unlocker/) I found that when sfp is loaded it keeps an open handle on the file SFP\\App\Bin\CDAccess\CD2000.dll.
In that folder there are three dlls (I suppose file system wrappers for different osses), the other ones are:

CD98Me.dll
CDXP.dll

My system is WinXP sp2, not Win 2000, so why isn't loaded the corresponding XP dll?
I really can't imagine why the detection of the os fails. I checked aspi installation, but the problem seems not related to aspi in any way, though without it SFP can't access akai discs. Anyone can confirm what dll is loaded on your PCs?

So I thought to try to force the use of the XP dll and I did this trick:
- I renamed the 2000 dll to something else
- I made a copy of the XP dll and renamed it "CD2000.dll", exactly like the original 2000 was named.

With this simple trick most of my problems now are SOLVED, SFP loads successfully changed cd roms and doesn't lock anymore the cd drive, doesn't cause any more problems to the system or other cd apps.
Akai cdroms are read only if they are substituted with other akai cdroms. If one normal cd is inserted in the the drive, it's not possible anymore to read akais on that drive without restarting SFP. This seems to be an unmounting issue of the akai engine: after unloading it for a normal cd SFP can't re-instantiate it.
Substituting akai.dll in the folder SFP\\App\Bin\ with a previous version (3.1a in my case) seems to solve also this last problem making akai cds being always read correctly.

Please let me know if you experience similar problems and what cd dll is loaded in your case

Hope it may be of help
Fede

Fede · Post by **Fede** » Sun Nov 25, 2007 4:23 pm

Update: AKAI cd *are* read till they are changed with other akai cds! otherwise a restart of sfp would be needed.

It seems that when the akai engine is unloaded on a drive, for the insertion of a normal cd, it cannot be reloaded properly: some sort of reference counting not properly managed or memory corruption or handle leak... don't know...

So, until my tests deny it, it seems there's a workaround for this thing, maybe I was the only one not to know or the only one to experience this?

cheers
Fede

Post by **garyb** » Sun Nov 25, 2007 5:11 pm

about replacing akai cds, have you tried to right click the in the file browser and chosen "clear cd cache"?

Fede · Post by **Fede** » Mon Nov 26, 2007 2:33 am

stardust wrote:...the game issue with safedisc is very interesting. Up to now the recommendation was more abstract saying: build a pure DAW. This shows much more detailed what game installation can do....wrong.

well, to say it all, an older version of secdrv.sys comes already with winXP (don't know if sp1 or sp2), so it is installed on ALL pcs: that older file hasn't any property displayed of version nor manufacturer, maybe that one is less harmful than the one installed by the game, but it turns out that it is quite difficult to build a pure daw starting from XP.
The problem with drm is that also those drivers may contain bugs and at a kernel level, maybe an updated version won't cause any problems: I've started inspecting this after I knew about the security bullettin from M$ some weeks ago regarding a vulnerability associated with it and ooops! I discovered it was also in my system and I didn't ever know.... what if I delete it?

cheers
Fede

Fede · Post by **Fede** » Mon Nov 26, 2007 3:07 am

garyb wrote:about replacing akai cds, have you tried to right click the in the file browser and chosen "clear cd cache"?

Have you plugged the mains cable?

yes, I forgot to mention in my long post: it never worked for me before yesterday on WinXP, on Win9x it ALWAYS worked.
I don't know exactly if this was due to the "changing with a normal cd" or whatever, anyway I'll test with the original dll again, although it is enough clear for me that that dll causes on my machine all the other problems, and I'll post my results asap (now I'm @work).

btw, I'd be curious to know, if you never encountered these problems, what configuration you are using: xp version, aspi version and # of files, any scsi peripherals?, but the most important: what cd dll is loaded by sfp while running.

cheers
Fede

Post by **garyb** » Mon Nov 26, 2007 10:00 am

well, i don't use akai cds in general, so perhaps i have the problem and don't know it. the demo samples that came with the card work, although changing a cd and viewing another in the scope filebrowser requires me to clear the cache.....

otherwise, i'm using sp2 xp home and i haven't installed aspi this time...

Post by **Neil B** » Mon Nov 26, 2007 11:59 am

I have used Akai Cd's in the past under Scope, both on 98 and XP.
Yes it does have intermittent wobblers that may be something to do with the indexing of the CD's in Akai format.
Clearing the cache generally did the trick though.

However, what I tend to do now (and I don't know if you use it) is to copy my Akai CD's via Kontakt - you get the waves plus the Kontakt format progs too.
However this generates multiple instances of the wav files and is much more greedy than doing it in Scope.

Back to Scope and try copying just a few samples (s & p) files over.
Then try a complete folder (a-xxx)
Then select all folders and see how it goes on.

I'll have a look into it on my rig if you give me a good idea of the procedure you want me to follow (so I can try and emulate your problems).

One thing to be aware of is that Akai disks themselves can genertae errors that are not related to Scope or your pc/operating system.
For instance one of the 5 disks in teh Symphony of Voices collection will not copy properly to hard disk - it leaves a few choirs/samples off. It took me weeks to sort this one out so there is a workaround.

Hope a bit of this gibberish helps ! It's late

Fede · Post by **Fede** » Mon Nov 26, 2007 5:40 pm

Neil B wrote: Back to Scope and try copying just a few samples (s & p) files over.
Then try a complete folder (a-xxx)
Then select all folders and see how it goes on.

I'll have a look into it on my rig if you give me a good idea of the procedure you want me to follow (so I can try and emulate your problems).

Main problem:
it is previous to any attempt of copying files:
after changing *any* disc all is slowed down, often it is not possible to access drives from Explorer, from SFP file browser nor from other sw: no cd are recognized to be inserted or old data is displayed until I close SFP: after that all returns to normality.
With this situation all is unpredictable and messy, sometimes akai works sometimes not.

SFP on my machine loads CD2000.dll, instead of CDXP.dll, I saw it with unlocker, but also other utilities can reveal it.

Do you reproduce all this?

I'm convinced that it is due to the loading of the wrong dll by SFP, in fact forcing the right dll with the rename trick solves almost everything on my machine, but...

The Akai problem:
Now, SFP is running with the renamed dll and the cd drive is empty.
I insert an akai disc-> I can read it - ok
I insert a normal disc-> I can read it - ok
I insert again an akai disc-> I cannot read it anymore - failure

On my pc "Clear CD Cache" this time won't work anymore, if I want to read akai discs again in *that* drive I have to restart SFP.

Maybe now I've sorted out also this thing: I've substituted the akai dll with the one that came with SFP 3.1a: it seems I can always load akai cds flawlessly.

maybe other version of that file might work, but version from 3.1c to 4.5 of the akai dll are the same binary and I couldn't test the 3.1b because I don't have the installer, so I'm happily using 3.1a.

cheers
Fede

Post by **hubird** » Mon Nov 26, 2007 5:50 pm

congrats, and you tried the ultimate

valis · Post by **valis** » Mon Nov 26, 2007 9:43 pm

Try removing the adaptec aspi support entirely (the 2 files you installed) as see how it works then. It could be that they're enabling some form of legacy support.

Fede · Post by **Fede** » Tue Nov 27, 2007 2:40 am

valis wrote:...It could be that they're enabling some form of legacy support.

I thought aspi was possibly fooling SFP, but no: same results without aspi or with any version from 4.6 to 4.72 for NT, 2000 or XP, except for the fact that trying to read akai cds without aspi results in SFP to crash.

Fede · Post by **Fede** » Tue Nov 27, 2007 2:46 am

hubird wrote:congrats, and you tried the ultimate

thanks, I'd try also with files from SFP 3.1b if I knew where to download it. The search feature of Planetz refuses "3.1b" as keyword so I'm unable to locate any topic about.

cheers
Fede

Fede · Post by **Fede** » Tue Nov 27, 2007 3:27 am

thanks stardust, but I need all the installation cd or some dlls from it

Fede · Post by **Fede** » Tue Nov 27, 2007 12:39 pm

stardust wrote:http://www.planetz.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=19769

I decided to install this driver to inspect if anything could change with it...

...oops! the power of auto suggestion?

How many users reported some sort of enhancement after installing it?

That is *NOT* the 3.1b driver!

...or maybe the 3.1b driver is binary identical to the current one?

ask windiff...

cheers
Fede