ECS K7S5A and Maxtor Hard Drive PROBLEM

[Smoke]

I feel your relief and vindication.

 

[Buz2b]

<< they have found out that the IDE Controller is faulty! >>

Roughly translated, "We don't know what is wrong!" The IDE controller wouldn't selectively work with other drives but not that one. However, that does not matter. What does matter is that they will "make it right" and you will be on your way to happy computing. Good luck and have fun!!

 

[Archman]

Well the problem is finally solved!!!

The shop gave me a call later that evening, and the guy who was working on it was puzzled, because origianlly Windows (he tried a few different version 9X,2K,XP) would almost install. A lot of error messages would pop up. His original idea of the IDE Controller being faulty was a guess, and he eventually found out what was wrong.

He spent the weekend trying to fix it, and on the Monday he called me to say that the solution was a BIOS flash to the January BIOS(the board ships with the latest BIOS). It was up and running beautifully, and I got home and started to load Win2000 and crossed my fingers when it got to the point that it would always fail at... no problems.

I mentioned that I attempted to flash the BIOS before and it would not allow me to, and they managed to flash it. So the problem is the latest BIOS "020206". In the newsgroup alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.elitegroup others have encountered similar problems with similar setups. One person had a Maxtor 40 GB hard drive and had the same problems until a BIOS flash to the January BIOS solved all of the problems.

This whole ordeal was very frustrating because I was begining to think that I had made a mistake somewhere, or damaged something... I kept trying to figure out where I went wrong. I was happy to FINALLY find out what the problem was! The computer shop where I got the motherboard was surprised to find out that there is a BIOS problem with the latest BIOS.

Oh how good it felt to finally relax!

Thank you everyone for your information and help

 

[Peter]

That February BIOS is indeed bad, I noticed that too. Your best option: Get the true latest BIOS for this board from the PC-Chips web site - the models M830LR (w/LAN) and M830 are the exact same product as ECS K7S5A, only that www.pcchips.com.tw has a 2002/04/29 BIOS. Using it as we speak. (I don't have any IDE stuff though )

The AMINF utility will nag that the BIOS tags don't match (old tag K7S5A, new tag M830/LR), just make it continue and enjoy. That's the only difference in BIOSes from ECS and PC-Chips - the latter ones have a different ID string and don't say "K7S5A" on the POST screen.

regards, Peter