Tapping Noises

[seeker]

It only began yesterday, but when booted into SuSe 9.2, there is a soft tapping, like someone lightly tapping their finger on a snare drum, coming from the speakers. This does not happen when booted into XP, so it must be something with the Linux configuration or software. Does anyone have an idea of what might solve this problem?

[whig]

"When booted": is this just a start-up .wav being played? Change it to something else and see if it persists. FWIW I get static bursts loading levels playing Far Cry under wine (SB Live hardware).

[seeker]

No, it pops during the boot, after the boot, and when ever it wants to. It doesn't seem to be related to any software, because it happens while the system is idling at desktop. The only thing that I can think of, is that I have had problems with aRts crashing, but that has never caused a noise like this, and I doubt that it would during the bootup.

[seeker]

This noise is gradually becoming more pronounced. I went into the KDE Control Center and took a look at the sound system. I disabled it, but that had no effect. I then tried to enable the skip prevention, but that caused an error to pop up, saying that the aRts wrapper was either disabled or missing. I really have no idea of what this wrapper is, or whether it could be the cause of the problem. Could someone explain this for me?

[seeker]

I just tried to run the installation repair function on SuSe and the system could not even see the DVD regardless of what drive I put it into. I've just about come to the conclusion that this problem along with some others that I have been having over the last few days is due to a motherboard problem. I'm going to go ahead and replace it, without waiting to see what MSI tell me, because it doesn't really matter.

[kgroombr]

If you have a audio cable between your CD/DVD drive, then it could be your CD/DVD drive. I played with it for at least a week or so on mine trying to get it to go away, then my CD drive stopped working. While it was running, I just pushed in the IDE cable to ensure it was seated properly. In the process, I unplugged the audio cable and the thumping stopped. CD drive was still dead, so I replaced it, and all is good to go now.

Good luck,
Ken

[seeker]

Originally Posted by kgroombr

If you have a audio cable between your CD/DVD drive, then it could be your CD/DVD drive. I played with it for at least a week or so on mine trying to get it to go away, then my CD drive stopped working. While it was running, I just pushed in the IDE cable to ensure it was seated properly. In the process, I unplugged the audio cable and the thumping stopped. CD drive was still dead, so I replaced it, and all is good to go now.

Good luck,
Ken

I believe that you hit a home run. I started fiddling with the wires, and it appears that either the CD/DVD audio cable has gone bad, or the connector for it on the audio card. I'm getting ready to replace the motherboard, so I will replace both of these along with it. The only thing that seems strange about this, is that the problem only occurred in Linux and not in Windows XP. I would have thought such a problem wouldn't care which platform was used.

Thanks.