ASUS A7V IDE Crazyness <--headache inducing, bring advil

shoe

Junior Member
May 17, 2000
21
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Its me again. This is long and crazy, so bear with me. I won't blame you for hitting &quot;back&quot; in fear of getting a headache.

I recently got an A7V with a 900mhz T-bird (1005 bios), that with your guy's help figured out how to o/c it using the multiplier adjustments (i forgot to flip dips 5 &amp; 6). It runs great and is very stable, but tried to install a CDR this morning with no luck, in fact, a bunch of weirdness. Problem happens with 1004 and 1005 bios, overclocked or not. Here's what is going on:

I have the A7V with two ATA 33/66 channels, and two ATA/100 Channels. I also have an ABIT Hotrod 100 RAID Card. Here is the setup: (not the numbers in parenthesis)

ATA 33/66:
(1) Primary Master: Kenwood 72x CD-ROM
(2) Primary Slave: None
(3) Secondary Master: None
(4) Secondary Slave: None

ATA 100:
(5) Primary Master: None
(6) Primary Slave: None
(7) Secondary Master: None
(8) Secondary Slave: None

HotROD 100 RAID:
Primary Master: 27.3gb 7200rpm Western Digital (Striped)
Primary Slave: None
Secondary Master: 27.3gb 7200rpm Western Digital (Striped)
Secondary Slave: None

Okay, I know I have too many channels for my needs, but hey... Anyway, I attempted to add a known good Nameless 8x4x32 CDR to (2) today, and it did very, very funny things to my system. First of all, in BIOS, whenever I selected Primary Slave, the screen would fill with random characters with different colors of text and different color background for each letter. Very pretty, but, uhh, not. Needless to say, bios was frozen. I rebooted into bios again, and went over to the main menu &quot;boot&quot; and the screen instantly went black and filled with just a few random random colored characters, not the whole screen this time. Bios frozen again. I then tried to boot not playing with bios, and all the devices (1-4) failed and could not be found.

Thinking it may be the drive, I plugged it into my old mobo (P3V4X) and it worked fine. I then unplugged the Kenwood 72x and set the CDR up to (1). Same thing happened with the bios and all. I then moved the CDR to (3), same thing. I then put my Kenwood at (3) and my CDR at (4), same thing. So, trying to narrow the problem down to the onboard ATA/33 controller, I moved the 72x to (5) and left the CDR out. On the &quot;loading onboard ATA/100 screen, it listed the drive as (5), but after scanning (5-8) it said &quot;ATA/100 Bios Not loaded because no drives were found.&quot; Same thing happened when the 72x was at (7). The CDR did the same thing at (5) and (7), and slaved to the 72x at (6) and (8). Windows does NOT recognize the drives, although ATA/100 bios does list them (still gives the message).

So, I think I have a flakey Motherboard. Also, EVERYTIME I restart Windows 2k, it will not Post. I have to completely turn the machine off, and power it on again, going into bios and setting all of the CPU Voltage/Bus speed stuff again (pain in the ass).

Again, both the problems occur overclocked and not, no matter which voltage I pick. I am not going to mess with the raid card, as I am scared it might &quot;un-raid&quot; my drives and lose all my Data for me.

Anyway, let me know if you have any suggestions or more questions.
Click here to email me.

Thanks again in advance,
Shoe
 

Night Blade

Senior member
Oct 9, 1999
439
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Nothing wrong with the CDR, grab the newest 1005a bios, it fixes the freezes/color fluxuating with the 1005 bios.
 

Marsupial

Junior Member
Dec 10, 2000
15
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Because of the way IDE works, it would be much better to put your other drive on it's own channel ((3) instead of (2)). Seeing that you have more than enough channnels to spare, I don't know why you would want to start cramming multiple devices on channels. If you decide to get a third optical drive, then you should put something as a slave (Promise and Asus recommend putting only hard drives on the promise controller, and I assume the same holds true for your RAID card).
 

shoe

Junior Member
May 17, 2000
21
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0
Even when I do put things seperate, things get crazy.

Got the 1005 bios, will try it tonight.