Abit KT7A-RAID problems

[DJOMCSE2000]

Happy new year to all.......here is my dilemma. I just bought another KT7A-RAID board, as I have 2 others and have nothing less than great performance with them. I striped two 30Gb 7200 (ATA-100) WD drives on the RAID controller and have a CDR on IDE-1 and a 24X CD-RW on IDE-2. The problem is that I cannot get Windows XP to load on this thing to save my life. One person told me that the BIOS needs to be updated, but I cannot get the revision from their site. For some reason, their ftp site times out. Anyway, has anyone had this same problem or heard anything about BIOS revisions causing problems with XP?

I appreciate any and all feedback!!

David

BTW, Win2k and Win98 worked fine, and the machine flies with those OS's. The other spec's are 512 MB SDRAM, Athlon 1.4 Ghz CPU

 

[Eric650]

I have the same mobo with 2 40gb HDs (5400 rpm) striped, and a 24x cdrom on IDE1. I have no problems booting up in windows XP. However, I cannot get Windows 2000 to install to save my life. During setup, when I try to install the HPT370 raid driver it freezes. I do have the earliest version (1.0) so I'm not really sure. But XP runs and boots fine. How does this configuration compare with your other sytems? do they run windows xp?

 

[spidro]

Go to Pauls unofficial Abit kt7a website (just type it in Google search) he has a section on RAID setup. He says to not hit the F6 key on install. Let the XP resident RAID driver install then once the system is up and running upgrade the raid driver with the latest from Abit. He also has the latest Bios, (official and unofficial) drivers and utilities. I have not tried the install yet but I also could not get XP to install from a clean boot. I loaded 2000 and did an upgrade to XP. Next time I will try without the F6 key.

 

[DJOMCSE2000]

Here's an update.

I had Windows 2000 running on it, but I felt it wasn't running as well as I thought it should. It was as if it was dragging compared to the Win98 installation I had on it. Anyway, I just blew out the installation and started over. I restriped and formatted the drives, and loaded Windows Millennium on it. After that, I loaded the video, audio and network drivers. Finally, the ROM-burning software. I'll tell you what. After seeing the way this machine flies, I may leave it here. After all was said and done, I was copying CD's effectively (disk-to-disk) at 24X. I tested a 450Mb CD, and it took (including program overhead) 3:08.

Side notes: I have two other KT7 boards (1-KT7-RAID and 1-KT7A-RAID) and both have 1Ghz CPUs on them and can run on Windows XP without a problem. When I tried upgrading the new one from Win2K to WinXP, it failed right after I hit the "Windows XP Professional Upgrade" on the boot menu. It just froze after the screen went black.

I am going to check out that website, too. Thanks for the tip. I have also heard about a website called www.tomshardware.com that sounds like it's worth checking out.

David