770Z DVD playback with DEVA card / Maximum hard drive size.

[Norway Pad]

Hello all

Since I bought the 770z, I have been working with a little project. As it's already got a PIII CPU and max. RAM, there wasn't much left to upgrade or change except adding a DEVA card.

So I bought and installed a DEVA card, and extracted the "MPEG driver IV for Windows 98/2000", where from the card was recognized by the system and installed. I also traced a copy of the Mediamatics DVDExpress software. I installed this, and updated it with the package from the Lenovo site, which gave the interface a newer look. But it refuses to play a DVD. I can locate the DVD through the DVDExpress interface and click to open the .ifo file. I am next prompted to select DVD-region, and then the whole interface disappears and nothing more happens. The same thing happens when I try it with WMP. The application just closes.

So can anyone give me any hints to what might be wrong here? Any more (Or different) drivers or software needed? I am not even sure how the DEVA card is supposed to work. Is this card only meant to decode DVD for output to an external TV, so that the DVD playback isn't supposed to be visible on the actual laptop screen? Unfortunately we have no TV in our house that can take S-Video or composite, only monitors, so I have no way of testing the output from the DEVA dongle.

This 770Z runs XP SP2. Maybe this only works under Win 2000? I have tons of other computers that play DVDs just fine, but there is a certain pleasure of making this old "giant" work like he should, and do all the things IBM engineered him to do.

Next question is how big hard drive the 770Z can take. There is no need for much storage space, so I am mostly after the 7200 speed, in the 40 - 120Gb range capacity. These are still easily available on eBay. The one that's there is a 13Gb drive, assumed 4200 rpm. I have seen from older posts that max hard drive size is dependent on the BIOS version, but I have never seen any actual description of what sizes of drives work and which ones don't.

Thank you for any answers!

[mnowell69]

the graphics cards for the 770x and 770z already have mpeg capability built in, ( the previous models needed an auxilliary card that slotted in underneath the battery!) so a deva card isn't necessary. All you need for these two laptops is the software to play dvds. On XP all you need is windvd 5.

The bios on old laptops limits the hard drive to about 8gb in size.

[Kasm279]

I'm not sure about the 770z, but it uses the same 440BX as my 600E, which currently has a 160GB hard drive in it, and all of it is usable.

[Norway Pad]

the graphics cards for the 770x and 770z already have mpeg capability built in, ( the previous models needed an auxilliary card that slotted in underneath the battery!) so a deva card isn't necessary. All you need for these two laptops is the software to play dvds. On XP all you need is windvd 5.

That was a surprise, and kind of contradicts what I have read before, where the DEVA card is mentioned as an option on all 770s, X and Z included. Is there some confusion here? The auxilliary card underneath the battery that you mention, IS the DEVA card. Needed or not, the DEVA still comes in handy with its TV output, and doubtfully makes DVD capability worse. And the Mediamatics software should still work. I can sure install and test Windvd5, but I would like to have this information confirmed first. Both regarding DEVA itself and the software.

When I did another search yesterday, I stumbled across this thread from 2009: http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... hilit=deva From the description given by user mdbrown, he seems to experience the same problem as I do, but no feedback was given by him on whether he solved this issue or not. I will look into some of the tips given by el-sahef and DK6400Brian.

The bios on old laptops limits the hard drive to about 8gb in size.

For your estimate on max. hard drive size; the 770Z came with 13 (Or was it 14?) Gb drives, so 8Gb is definitely not the limit here.

[Norway Pad]

Update: While the forum has been down, I checked out that both IDE-channels are in DMA mode. And they are. I even uninstalled and reinstalled the "IBM Signal Processor", which I think is the DEVA card. DVD playback still not working and still not seeing any apparent hardware faults here. I will find another hard drive and put Win2000 on it, just to try this from Win2000 environment.

So still interested in input regarding DVD playback from XP, as this apparently works for other users. I haven't tried WinDVD5 as suggested above, as I would like that confirmed before I install more software.

[Raceboy]

"IBM Signal Processor" is related to dial-up modem, not DEVA card.

You can try MediaPlayer Classic, I am pretty sure it works with it.

[Norway Pad]

Ok. I was sure this signal processor device appeared after the DEVA card was installed, but maybe I'm wrong. Isn't the DEVA card visible at all in the device manager? I guess the easiest way for me to find out is to physically remove the DEVA card and see what device (maybe) disappears.

The reason for my search is that I thought there could be some settings for the card that could be accessible somewhere, but maybe there isn't. After that, I will try Media Player Classic, as you suggest. I see this software has been mentioned in other threads regarding this subject too.

[Raceboy]

DEVA card should appear in Device Manager under the "Sound, video and game controllers" since it is a multimedia device and so far all accelerator cards that I have used (3dFX Voodoo2, Creative DXR MPEG2 DVD decoder etc) have been this way.

[Norway Pad]

You are right, the DEVA card shows up as "IBM DVD Decoder Card" in the category Sound, video and game controllers.

Ok, so I downloaded the Media Player Classic. The newest version wouldn't install on XP SP2, so I tried some older ones. These aren't even installed, they just run from the exe file. Anyway, when I opened the DVD, these players played the DVD apparently perfect for 5-10 seconds. Then I just got solid colored stripes across the screen, everything locked up, and the computer needed a hard reboot.

Then I tried to disable the Trident driver, which is the recommended way of getting rid of the "artifacts" on the screen, that I understand is caused by some issues between the PIII CPU and the graphics card(?). And at this point Media Player Classic actually plays the DVD, but with a picture delay, which is probably caused by the lack of a graphics driver. Last I re-enabled the Trident driver and rebooted 3-4 times, until I got the screen without artifacts, but then the screen started freezing up again after 5-10 seconds. So at this point I have to assume that for some reason DVD playback is impossible on this 770Z. Maybe because of the PIII upgrade, maybe something else.

I will anyway install Windows 2000 sometime to see if it works from that OS, but not sure how much work I bother putting into this, as the 770 will be a collectible, spending most of it's life on a shelf.

For the hard drive, I installed and cloned my XP install onto a 60Gb 7200 drive, which worked like a charm, and made a significant difference in speed.

[mnowell69]

just to add to this a bit more.

I have a PIII 750 in my 770 that naturally runs at 600mhz thanks to the speedstep issue. I have no issues at all watching DVDs on this laptop, using WINDVD 5. If i wanted to output a video signal i would have to use the standard video out port at the back of the laptop. I also read somewhere that to use dvd in WIN XP only media player 9 would work. If you try to use POWERDVD or WINDVD, they both ignore the DEVA card. Although i seem to remember having to install WINDVD for the codec, that media player 9 required.

[Norway Pad]

Thanks for the input, I will try WINDVD as a last attempt when I put the XP hard drive back in.

Right now I trying to install Win2K on the original 14.1Gb drive, but few things seems to work right on this computer. Win2K can't detect the hard drive, my different SP'ed XP install CDs either fail to load certain drivers or triggers errors, and not even a Linux distro wants to load. Trying to make stuff work on this computer turned into a very frustrating experience, so given it's pristine condition, I am considering leaving it on display on my Thinkpad legacy-shelf.

Edit: Right now it actually boots from a Vista(!) DVD, and the hard drive is seen and if being formatted. I'll see if that helps. Not that I would ever consider actually installing Vista on it, I am assuming the terms slow and running short on memory would get a totally new dimension there. But Kudos to Vista for being the only OS so far with an install medium that was able to do something reasonable on the 770..

[mnowell69]

If the installation disks can't see the HDD, then you could try using the win 98 start up floppy (or similar) and use FDISK to erase the partitions it finds, and start again. This has ALWAYS worked for me in the past, although i can't understand why your instal disks don't find the HDD.

[Norway Pad]

I erased the drive with the tools on the Vista DVD, so that's ok. Some Win2K and XP install disks can now see it, but as I move further in the install process I get other error messages. The ones I took most notice of were "Not enough page file to complete" (Translated from norwegian) and "File \ntkrnlmp.exe could not be loaded. The error code is 7"

This is apparently related to RAM or BIOS errors, which points me in the direction that something here is messed up because the CPU is upgraded to PIII, and I think the BIOS might be a modified one that deals with the PIII L2 cache issue(?) Unfortunately this upgrade was already done when I bought it, so I don't know enough about this upgrade in general or what was modified to make it work. Or if things worked like they should before the upgrade.

I have the old CPU and RAM parts though, so if I knew for sure that *is* the reason, I could downgrade it, at least until I get the OS installed. But a lot of work, and I don't know exactly what might need to be reverted. If I chose to pursue this further, I might start a new thread, as this is far away from the original problem posted here. Any hints to whether I am on totally wrong tracks here could be interesting, though.

Well, I guess I am on the wrong tracks here anyway, simply beause I'm really just doing this in order to prove to myself that I can make it play a DVD..

[mnowell69]

you may be pleased to hear that it's nothing to do with the P3 upgrade. If you can fire up the laptop without bios error messages all is well. The only time i got crazy problems like yours was when i tried to use a HDD that was too big on my 770 ( the original version) . I tried to be clever and use a 20gb HDD but the bios saw only 8.6gb ( or thereabouts) and all sorts of mad things would happen. Sounds to me like a RAM or HDD problem. I have had those messages of yours before, but i cannot remember when, where or why anymore.

I have never had any problems installing any form of windows on my 770X. but i always used fdisk to erase my HDDs when i had problems on other computers.

[Norway Pad]

Well, that's good to hear.

I can barely remember I've ever had any major issues installing Windows on any machine, all the way back from Win95, so all these issues here put me off a little bit. But if we can rule out the PIII upgrade, I might try to remove some of the RAM modules to see if that helps. The hard drive is the 14.1GB that it came with, so that should be ok. When I run XP on it, I run that from a 60Gb drive, which is ok too.

But thank you for the input, I might not leave this project all the way dead yet. It's cold outside, so basically nothing else to do than playing around with my Thinkpads..

[pkiff]

I've got a couple of these 770Z's and I've had various OSes installed on them at various times, and I ran into some issues with the DEVA card as well, so I'll try to summarize what I remember as well as respond to a couple stray other issues that have cropped up in this thread so far.

First the stray issues:

I am not even sure how the DEVA card is supposed to work. Is this card only meant to decode DVD for output to an external TV, so that the DVD playback isn't supposed to be visible on the actual laptop screen? Unfortunately we have no TV in our house that can take S-Video or composite, only monitors, so I have no way of testing the output from the DEVA dongle.

The DEVA contains an MPEG 2 hardware decoder AND various outputs that allow you to output your entire screen (including a full-screen video, but it can also just be your regular desktop) to a TV through RCA or S-Video. To output to those other formats, you need a proprietary IBM dongle that fits into that tiny, tiny output hole in the DEVA card and then has the various standard RCA and S-Video connectors. A properly installed and functioning DEVA card will re-route MPEG2 (i.e.DVD) encoding tasks through itself, reducing the demand on the CPU significantly, regardless of whether that DVD is played onto the built-in LCD or output through the standard VGA at the back or through the proprietary dongle to a TV. To get the TV output to work properly, you may need to disable the LCD display, and if you don't, you may need to change the screen resolution of the LCD to 800x600 or even smaller. There are some additional quirks involved in getting the DEVA to TV output to work which mean that you may need to plug in things in the right order: I forget exactly, but the safest is probably to plug in the DEVA to the TV and turn on the TV and then boot your machine. There are discussions of most of these quirks here in the deep archives of this forum somewhere.

I'm not sure about the 770z, but it uses the same 440BX as my 600E, which currently has a 160GB hard drive in it, and all of it is usable.

Kasm279 is right about this and that is my experience with the 770Z as well. In some OSes, you might have to partition the drive so that no single partition is larger than 128GB, but lots of people are running very large drives in these old machines.

the graphics cards for the 770x and 770z already have mpeg capability built in, ( the previous models needed an auxilliary card that slotted in underneath the battery!) so a deva card isn't necessary.

That was a surprise, and kind of contradicts what I have read before, where the DEVA card is mentioned as an option on all 770s, X and Z included. Is there some confusion here?

Yes, there is some confusion. The 770X and 770Z (and 770ED) were supposed to ship with the DEVA card included. They were promoted as high-end multimedia machines, and the DEVA outputs were part of that. For other 770 series: the plain 770 and the 770E the DEVA was an extra add-on. And something else to check: there were 2 different hardware versions of the DEVA card: only the later one was compatible with the 770X and 770Z, so if you are having DEVA issues, you should start by double-checking the part number on your card and making sure you have the one that was designed to work in your 770Z.

Right now I trying to install Win2K on the original 14.1Gb drive, but few things seems to work right on this computer. Win2K can't detect the hard drive, my different SP'ed XP install CDs either fail to load certain drivers or triggers errors, and not even a Linux distro wants to load.

This may be a problem related to booting from a CD system disk. After the upgrade to a PIII, the boot from CD function is broken unless you edit the BIOS to remove the L2 check during bootup. Even then, I also had some issues using regular install disks on my 770Z's. The CD drives that shipped with the 770Z were sometimes also crappy and they would not all properly read CD-RW or CD-R disks, so if you are trying the install with anything but a manufacturer pressing, that might be the issue. I think the boot-from-CD is fixed after you edit the CMOS to remove the L2 check, but I'm not 100% sure.

Then some notes on the DVD issues:

- The 770Z should be able to play a DVD smoothly without any hardware acceleration or assistance required. This is especially true if you have upgraded the CPU to a PIII. Getting the DEVA to work would be nice, but is not really necessary. The quality of video that the 770Z is capable of through the DEVA to your TV will not be as good as what you can get from a recent, $50 DVD player that attaches directly to your TV.

- Only a couple programs were written to properly hook into the DEVA hardware decoding. I think there are three of them. 1 is for Win 98 only. The other two are MediaMatics DVDExpress and Windows built-in Media Player. Which version of Microsoft's Media Player will work, I don't know. I would guess probably version 6 through 8? Version 6 for sure. I doubt that current versions do. Media Player Classic does not make use of the DEVA. Neither does WinDVD as far as I know. You can still use these programs to play a DVD and output it to your TV through the DEVA outputs (I have), but those other programs won't be using the hardware MPEG decoder in the DEVA.

- Win2000 was the last operating system that really worked smoothly and fully with the DEVA. The drivers for the DEVA are built in to Win2000. For Win 98SE, you need to install drivers. For XP, you should be able to install the Win2000 drivers, but I personally am not sure that I ever got the DEVA's MPEG2 hardware decoding to work correctly in XP with my PIII 770Z's. I got the outputs working fine, I just was never convinced that ANY of my attempts to get my machine to take advantage of the MPEG decoding part worked.

Good luck!

Phil.

[Norway Pad]

First of all: Thank you very much for a great and detailed answer that is beyond what I expected.

The DEVA contains an MPEG 2 hardware decoder AND various outputs that allow you to output your entire screen (including a full-screen video, but it can also just be your regular desktop) to a TV through RCA or S-Video. To output to those other formats, you need a proprietary IBM dongle that fits into that tiny, tiny output hole in the DEVA card and then has the various standard RCA and S-Video connectors. A properly installed and functioning DEVA card will re-route MPEG2 (i.e.DVD) encoding tasks through itself, reducing the demand on the CPU significantly, regardless of whether that DVD is played onto the built-in LCD or output through the standard VGA at the back or through the proprietary dongle to a TV.

Ok, so I see now what the purpose of these cards were. I have the dongle, but we currently have no TV in this house, only monitors. So I will bring it to my moms house sometime to try output the picture to her TV, and see if it at least outputs a picture from Windows. But I really don't expect the actual DVD playback to work there either.

And something else to check: there were 2 different hardware versions of the DEVA card: only the later one was compatible with the 770X and 770Z, so if you are having DEVA issues, you should start by double-checking the part number on your card and making sure you have the one that was designed to work in your 770Z.

Oh, I didn't know. I noticed on ThinkWiki that it was two part numbers, but I didn't strike my mind that they were different. Does anyone have the part number for the correct card for the 770Z handy? I will look around for it too; this can hopefully explain the issues with playback, even though it should be able to do it without the DEVA card, as you say.

Even then, I also had some issues using regular install disks on my 770Z's. The CD drives that shipped with the 770Z were sometimes also crappy and they would not all properly read CD-RW or CD-R disks, so if you are trying the install with anything but a manufacturer pressing, that might be the issue. I think the boot-from-CD is fixed after you edit the CMOS to remove the L2 check, but I'm not 100% sure.

It can boot from CD. And I actually think that the disks that didn't work are CD-Rs, yes. You are right about that. So I can sum up that the "real" Microsoft disks (And even the Win2K boot floppies) were the ones to throw the "\ntkrnlmp.exe could not be loaded" and "not enough page file"-errors. That seems to be the real fault, so I am then back to either BIOS or RAM errors. I also think it would have been an advantage for me start with "clean sheets" when it comes to upgrades. At least if I knew that things worked on the non-PIII upgraded machine, I knew I could make it work again by reverting things. Now I am not sure; it might be a waste of time, and I might mess up stuff as I don't know all the details of what was done to make it work.

Then some notes on the DVD issues:

- The 770Z should be able to play a DVD smoothly without any hardware acceleration or assistance required. This is especially true if you have upgraded the CPU to a PIII. Getting the DEVA to work would be nice, but is not really necessary. The quality of video that the 770Z is capable of through the DEVA to your TV will not be as good as what you can get from a recent, $50 DVD player that attaches directly to your TV.

- Win2000 was the last operating system that really worked smoothly and fully with the DEVA. The drivers for the DEVA are built in to Win2000. For Win 98SE, you need to install drivers. For XP, you should be able to install the Win2000 drivers, but I personally am not sure that I ever got the DEVA's MPEG2 hardware decoding to work correctly in XP with my PIII 770Z's. I got the outputs working fine, I just was never convinced that ANY of my attempts to get my machine to take advantage of the MPEG decoding part worked.

I will continue working with this, both with and without the card, checking out if I maybe have the wrong kind of DEVA card, and if possible put Win2000 on it. But all within limits. I am no longer sure how much work I want to put into getting an old collectable laptop playing a DVD.

Thank you a lot for the answer, this has really shed some light upon the numerous issues I have faced here.