BIOS corrupt on Iwill board?

Delorian

Senior member
Mar 10, 2004
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I had never heard of Iwill MBs before until my friend brought me his that had a problem. It seems like some sort of IDE controller problem but I'm not so sure. It won't recognize his HD he's had in there for a couple years now. He also has a DVD drive and a CDRW that won't come up either. I put an old 1GB that I had in there and it auto-detected the drive but shows garbled characters for the drive name and I'm not able to partition it. I reboot after partitioning in FDisk and there are no partitions there on the next boot. A couple of the times I was in the standard settings in CMOS the screen would change to a random color (instead of blue bg/white text) and I couldn't see all the options until I arrowed down through them. I was wondering if anyone had experiences with Iwills that may have had similar problems and if this would concern the Onboard IDE controller or the BIOS.


Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks in advance

BTW two sets of IDE cables and HDs have been tested fine in another machine but still have problems on this board.
 

o1die

Diamond Member
Jul 8, 2001
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I'd try switching the first hardrive to the other ide controller. The 1 gb may be too old.
 

Delorian

Senior member
Mar 10, 2004
590
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The board has 4 IDE connections, 2 for RAID, 2 for standard IDE, I've tried all 4 slots w/2 different cables (tried master/slave and cable select) and the board sits for awhile on auto-detect and ends up not finding the drive, though if nothing is connected it will immediately show nothing found. I was betting on a bad IDE interface for awhile but the BIOS "corruption" leads me to think otherwise. I'm not sure though, it could be a combination of the two.

Thanks for your help though, any thoughts are very welcome cause i'm stumped:confused:
 

FreakyGuy

Senior member
Dec 12, 2001
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hmm Sounds to me that you got a XP333-R raid motherboard. Have you tried to update the Bios?
 

Delorian

Senior member
Mar 10, 2004
590
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I'm trying to flash the board which I found out is a KK266-R IWill board. Only problem is that before it flashes the bios, it gives an unknown flash program response. This was the latest driver for the board and it doesn't seem to want to go through. I'll keep playing with it and see if I can find something through Iwill. Thanks for your help so far guys, I'll post back if I get any new problems/solutions!
 

Delorian

Senior member
Mar 10, 2004
590
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After attempting to flash the drive it seems to be worse. I booted up the floppy, ran AWDFLASH.exe and successfully backed up the old bios and tried to flash the new one but I got an "unknown program type" error and had to reboot. Now it doesn't want to boot off of any floppy (non system-disk or disk not found error) and when I hit the Alt-F2 combo to flash during post, it says it can't find AWDFLASH.EXE even though it's on the root of the floppy. Boy this is getting hairy! I guess I'll try to re-copy/rename the AWDFLASH.EXE or switching floppy drives maybe. Not getting those weird discoloration problems in setup though. This is one of the stranger things I've encountered, that's for sure.

Thanks for your help!