I love an unexpected bonus - Biostar M7VIG

[tcsenter]

I received this mainboard a couple weeks ago but just got around to enabling the integrated USB today. The M7VIG is based on the VIA KM266 and according to all published specs 'supposed' to use the VIA VT8233A South Bridge. The VT8233A has integrated USB 1.1, as my previous mainboard did, so I expected the USB drivers to install without complaint.

Well Hardware Wizard could not find a driver. I was pulling my hair out for a while trying to figure out what the hell was going on. So I grab the Biostar CD, thinking maybe there is some weird OEM specific driver needed. I find an install option for USB, it installs the driver, and I restart. I notice that in Device Manager it says USB2.0! WTF? VT8233A isn't a USB2.0 chipset.

So I looked for a discrete USB2.0 chip such as the VT6202 but found nothing. I peel back the "ATA133" sticker covering the South Bridge, it is the VT8235 with integrated USB2.0, not the VT8233A. Woohoo!

WCPUID v3.1a misidentifies the South Bridge with Device ID 3177h as the VT8233A as does a few other hardware ID sources on the internet.

Bonus!

 

[OS]

That's cool, it's like a free 20 dollar add in card.

 

[tcsenter]

That's cool, it's like a free 20 dollar add in card.

Yeah I was all bummed out because I could have gotten the M7VIG PRO for the same price as the M7VIG but I didn't find out until after I already took the M7VIG. The PRO version has USB2.0 from the VT8235, plus a nifty red/pink PCB. I'm not so bummed now, quite happy in fact. A color PCB is neat and all but not functional like USB2.0.

 

[eplebnista]

 

[RockyMaivia]

tcsenter,

Do you have the m7vig version 1.2?

 

[Killrose]

Does the Biostar M7VIG have any overclocking features?

 

[Remedy]

KillRose, I'm not sure if the Biostar does, but the Epox KM266 and the Aopen KM266 both have overlocking support. FSB only, but the support is there. Max you would get from the KM266's is 10-12mhz max on an overclock. Tbred processors might be higher.

 

[tcsenter]

Do you have the m7vig version 1.2?

Yep.

Does the Biostar M7VIG have any overclocking features?

Not many.

With the latest BIOS (1014), it has the following selectable FSB/PCI options:

100/33
105/35
107/36
109/37
114/38 <-- end 1/3 divider
119/30 <-- start 1/4 divider
123/31
133/33 <-- hardware jumper to set 133FSB

The BIOS actually shows FSB/PCI option for 109/33, which I'm sure is just a typo/error in the BIOS text field. I don't know what options would appear for a 133FSB CPU, since I'm using a 100FSB CPU. There is no CPU voltage adjustment.

DDR RAM has voltage adjustment jumper 2.5v, 2.6v, 2.7v, 2.8v. No other options that I can see for overclocking, except manual DRAM timing configuration.

 

[j2cat]

I got an M7VIG Pro to upgrade an old system. I got an athlon XP1800+ and a 330Watt PS to complete the upgrade since I could use my old PC133 RAM, case, HDDs, CDRW, etc. Total upgrade price, with shipping was just a bit over $200. Seems like a reasonable price to go from a K6-400 to a more-or-less up to date sytem with LAN and USB2.0.

But, I can't get the on-board USB to work right nor can I get the on-board LAN to work. I've tried two of these boards and they both behave exactly the same. I'm using Win2KPro.

Everything else seems to work just great. Snappy video, good sound, runs apps nice and quick.

I put in a PCI bus LAN card and it works just great.

I don't mind having to put in a separate LAN card ($5.00 at Officemax, after all), but having to put in an $18 USB 2.0 card starts to put the price/hassle factor up to where I might just as well send this second board back too, and shop for a different MB.

Since it seems highly unlikely that I'd get two of these motherboards with exactly the same defect, it's more reasonable to guess that there's something wrong with how I'm setting this board up. I've tried all of the alleged driver updates for Win2K and this motherboard/chipset. I've re-flashed the Bios with what seemed to be the latest version from the Biostar site (VIG1014b.bin) and that bios doesn't even show the enable/disable for the LAN, so it's obviously not the proper Bios for this board (despite it being the one linked to for it on Biostar's site).

Either I'm doing something stupid in the Bios or other setup, or possibly my whole installation of Win2K is bad. The reason I suggest this is because the CD drive that I had in the machine when I was installing Win2K was a bit flakey (seeming to have a hard time reading even factory CDs) and I've since replaced it with a good, reliable old 16X burner that I trust.

The On-board LAN shows up as being installed and running fine in windows' device manager, and the driver is claimed to be just dandy, but no packets of data ever come or go. When I plug in the PCI LAN card, things take off and run fine immediately.

The on-board USB is just strange. A printer connected seems to work just fine, but a USB hub, an outboard USB 2.0 hard drive, and a scanner all fail to work properly.

The scanner installs ok, and it appears to work. But, it sends data to the computer very verrrrry slowly. Like about 20 times slower than with it connected to any other machine. This scanner is only a USB 1 type device, so it's not a 2.0 vs 1.0 kind of thing. It's just running slooowly even for USB 1.

The Hub won't even install or be recognized when you plug it in.

The outboard USB2.0 hard drive box (with hard drive, of course) works just great on every other USB 2.0, Win2K system I've plugged it into. On this system, though, it takes about two minutes for the system to see that it's been connected, then another three or four minutes before the dialog disappears from the screen. At that point, it doesn't show up in windows explorer, and device manager says that the device "failed to start". On other systems, you plug it in and immediately a dialog pops up on the screen saying that the USB mass storage device has been found, and within seconds, it's showing up in windows explorer and ready to rock and roll. (Now that USB2.0 external drive box is one item I *can* recommend, it's really cool).

I have not tried the on-board serial or parallel ports, so maybe they're bad too.

I'll bet someone out there knows what I'm doing wrong

I'm considering completely formatting and reinstalling the OS and all of my programs just to see if maybe my Win2K installation is corrupt from the crappy CD drive that I was using when I installed it. But I'd think that some sort of error correction/detection would have kept the OS from actually seeming to install properly if the drive wasn't reading the discs properly.

If anyone recognizes what I might be doing wrong from this description, I'd just love to hear some suggestions.

Oh, the box says that this is an M7VIG Pro VER:1.1 if that means anything.

Thanks everyone!

J2

 

[RU482]

Originally posted by: OS
That's cool, it's like a free 20 dollar add in card.

Yeah, a $20 add on card that's you'd probably never need. Still a pretty cool find, though!!

 

[GetInMyFatBelly]

Looks like MSI has a new board to compete with the Biostar M7VIG Pro. The MSI KM2M Combo-L.
http://www.msi.com.tw/program/products/mainboard/mbd/pro_mbd_detail.php?UID=411&MODEL=MS-6738

Differences I've noticed so far.

Heatsinks on the power supply on MSI board.
one has realtek sound, the other has C-Media, which of these was better.
Biostar has a CNR slot and gameport.
MSI has the P4 Power connecter? Maybe for better OCing?

 

[OatMan]

Looks like I'm in just about the same boat as J2CAT.

I have had miriad problems with this board, but I'm not sure if its me or not. As I also was able to install my OS and drives (WinXP Prow SP1).

My USB detects neither my cable modem, nor my USB ZIP 100.

My EtherNIC doesn't work with my Cable modem either (L3 Road Runner support gave up and said it must be the drivers)

I installed all new drivers from the included CD. I also tried installing the newest drivers from the Biostar site. NO LUCK.

Among my other minor problems, I was getting funny temp readings, as others with this problem were fine after a BIOS flash, I also tried the VIG1014b.bin BIOS. First with the BIOSflash utility in the CMOS which yeilded a checksum error. Luckily no damage, so I downloaded it again, and tried the award BIOS flash from DOS disk. THis seemed to work. But now it seems to be Dead. I boot, and the lights and fans go, but no POST, no BOOT. No drive seek or anything. No BIOSTAR splash screen. Uh oh. I tried the Clear BIOS jumpers and no go. I backed up the original BIOS, but there doesn't seem to be any way to revert. I think I'm screwed.

PLEASE ADVISE!!! Do I have to RMA this board???

HUGE TIA!

Hot Deals thread I Purchased from...

 

[RobCur]

i feel your pain, you need a chip puller and if you have computer with similar bios chipset like 2mbit then it is possible flash on another computer :Q
it kind of like hotswapping, where you have to turn it on, boot into dos, take out bios and switch flash, switch again and then hoping the one you flashed is correct and will work. if not keep repeating! LMAO
but their is another way, i think on some website that say that even a dead bios can boot up into dos
you set it in autoexec.bat and tell it to autoflash for you lol. you're basically blind but again, very
troublesome :Q

Originally posted by: OatMan
Looks like I'm in just about the same boat as J2CAT.

I have had miriad problems with this board, but I'm not sure if its me or not. As I also was able to install my OS and drives (WinXP Prow SP1).

My USB detects neither my cable modem, nor my USB ZIP 100.

My EtherNIC doesn't work with my Cable modem either (L3 Road Runner support gave up and said it must be the drivers)

I installed all new drivers from the included CD. I also tried installing the newest drivers from the Biostar site. NO LUCK.

Among my other minor problems, I was getting funny temp readings, as others with this problem were fine after a BIOS flash, I also tried the VIG1014b.bin BIOS. First with the BIOSflash utility in the CMOS which yeilded a checksum error. Luckily no damage, so I downloaded it again, and tried the award BIOS flash from DOS disk. THis seemed to work. But now it seems to be Dead. I boot, and the lights and fans go, but no POST, no BOOT. No drive seek or anything. No BIOSTAR splash screen. Uh oh. I tried the Clear BIOS jumpers and no go. I backed up the original BIOS, but there doesn't seem to be any way to revert. I think I'm screwed.

PLEASE ADVISE!!! Do I have to RMA this board???

HUGE TIA!

Hot Deals thread I Purchased from...

 

[OatMan]

I've already wasted way too much time with this board, but thanks for the advice. I'll try and dig up more on what you describe.
I have put my hands in Neweggs famed RMA support. I just hope they assume that an RMA + simo order of same item = cross-ship.

Any ideas regarding the USB and LAN support??? I'm assuming its me and not the board, and I'll have the same issue with the new board...

Thanks again all.

 

[LiverX]

Originally posted by: j2cat
I got an M7VIG Pro to upgrade an old system. I got an athlon XP1800+ and a 330Watt PS to complete the upgrade since I could use my old PC133 RAM, case, HDDs, CDRW, etc. Total upgrade price, with shipping was just a bit over $200. Seems like a reasonable price to go from a K6-400 to a more-or-less up to date sytem with LAN and USB2.0.

But, I can't get the on-board USB to work right nor can I get the on-board LAN to work. I've tried two of these boards and they both behave exactly the same. I'm using Win2KPro.

Everything else seems to work just great. Snappy video, good sound, runs apps nice and quick.

I put in a PCI bus LAN card and it works just great.

I don't mind having to put in a separate LAN card ($5.00 at Officemax, after all), but having to put in an $18 USB 2.0 card starts to put the price/hassle factor up to where I might just as well send this second board back too, and shop for a different MB.

Since it seems highly unlikely that I'd get two of these motherboards with exactly the same defect, it's more reasonable to guess that there's something wrong with how I'm setting this board up. I've tried all of the alleged driver updates for Win2K and this motherboard/chipset. I've re-flashed the Bios with what seemed to be the latest version from the Biostar site (VIG1014b.bin) and that bios doesn't even show the enable/disable for the LAN, so it's obviously not the proper Bios for this board (despite it being the one linked to for it on Biostar's site).

Either I'm doing something stupid in the Bios or other setup, or possibly my whole installation of Win2K is bad. The reason I suggest this is because the CD drive that I had in the machine when I was installing Win2K was a bit flakey (seeming to have a hard time reading even factory CDs) and I've since replaced it with a good, reliable old 16X burner that I trust.

The On-board LAN shows up as being installed and running fine in windows' device manager, and the driver is claimed to be just dandy, but no packets of data ever come or go. When I plug in the PCI LAN card, things take off and run fine immediately.

The on-board USB is just strange. A printer connected seems to work just fine, but a USB hub, an outboard USB 2.0 hard drive, and a scanner all fail to work properly.

The scanner installs ok, and it appears to work. But, it sends data to the computer very verrrrry slowly. Like about 20 times slower than with it connected to any other machine. This scanner is only a USB 1 type device, so it's not a 2.0 vs 1.0 kind of thing. It's just running slooowly even for USB 1.

The Hub won't even install or be recognized when you plug it in.

The outboard USB2.0 hard drive box (with hard drive, of course) works just great on every other USB 2.0, Win2K system I've plugged it into. On this system, though, it takes about two minutes for the system to see that it's been connected, then another three or four minutes before the dialog disappears from the screen. At that point, it doesn't show up in windows explorer, and device manager says that the device "failed to start". On other systems, you plug it in and immediately a dialog pops up on the screen saying that the USB mass storage device has been found, and within seconds, it's showing up in windows explorer and ready to rock and roll. (Now that USB2.0 external drive box is one item I *can* recommend, it's really cool).

I have not tried the on-board serial or parallel ports, so maybe they're bad too.

I'll bet someone out there knows what I'm doing wrong

I'm considering completely formatting and reinstalling the OS and all of my programs just to see if maybe my Win2K installation is corrupt from the crappy CD drive that I was using when I installed it. But I'd think that some sort of error correction/detection would have kept the OS from actually seeming to install properly if the drive wasn't reading the discs properly.

If anyone recognizes what I might be doing wrong from this description, I'd just love to hear some suggestions.

Oh, the box says that this is an M7VIG Pro VER:1.1 if that means anything.

Thanks everyone!

J2

I just got the onboard LAN and USB 2.0 to work on my new board:

LAN - Had to substitute my old Vortex SQ2500 sound card for my Acoustic Edge. Could not change IRQ's to get rid of conflict. I could never get the onboard LAN and onboard sound to run together. (I thought this was because I am running win98, but I see you are running win2K).

USB - I deleted all USB devices under Device Manager as well as all the stuff under the USB heading. Make sure you have the latest 4-in-1 drivers. (Unless you're running win98 like me , then 4.38 is the lateste version you should run).

As another poster has mentioned, I am seeing cpu temps that are 20-30 degrees higher than my old EPOX 8kHM.

good luck...

 

[j2cat]

At this point, I've sent back the first of these two boards, but the second one is acting exacly the same. No on-board LAN, USB doesn't work. Everything else is just fine.

I've got a friend who put one of these boards into a new system with WinXP and has had NO problems with it. We proved that his on-board LAN worked, and we also plugged on my USB 2.0 outboard HDD unit and it recognized it and ran perfectly immediately.

The only odd thing was that if you just barely touched the LAN cable, it would show up as being disconnected, so I'm thinking that the actual connector for the LAN may be a bit weak or flakey (at least on his board, but maybe on all of these). Maybe you've got to hold the LAN cable just right to get it to make proper contact or something. I should probably hose the area down with some good old De-Oxit and maybe reach in there and bend the little fingers down a bit.

Since my friend had no problems with this exact same motherboard, and he only installed the drivers and 4-in-1 that came on the CD, I'm trying that exact route with this second board of mine. I have *not* flashed the Bios, and I may try reformatting my HDD and then starting from scratch. Making sure to use only the drivers that came with the system. But I have very little confidence that that would do any good. I've already just installed the CD's 4-in-1 and USB2.0 drivers on top of what I already had in the hopes that it would replace the existing drivers. But this has made no difference.

I also noted some strangeness with the CPU temperature reporting. Prior to flashing the BIOS on the old board, the temps read in the lower 50s. Right around 53 degrees with an Athlon XP1800+ (not overclocked), and the cheap-o fan/heatsink that comes in the AMD "retail box" cpu setup. After I flashed the BIOS, the temperature was reported as being about ten degrees cooler! In the lower 40s.

Now, wth the second board (its BIOS having *not* been flashed) it reads in the lower 50s again. Very odd.

My friend's system, with XP and an Athlon XP2200+, Overclocked about 10% also reads in the lower 50s, but he's got a more expensive, aftermarket fan and heatsink setup. His CPU went up into the 60s when you closed his case, but we fixed that by turning one case fan around so that it now fires into the case and forces more air up over the CPU area and through the power supply to get out. Now his reads in the 53 area case open or closed.

Because flashing the BIOS on my first board also made all mention of the LAN disappear from the setup screens of the BIOS, I can't help but think that the "newer" BIOS from the Biostar site is not the right one for this board. It's possible that it also doesn't properly read the temperature. I think that the 53 degree area is quite believable, and that's what the "stock" BIOS reads.

I've never had this sort of trouble with any other motherboard. I may RMA this second one back and just find another good MB. My ASUS V78AX has been wonderful. All of the on-board stuff works fine right out of the box. Of course, it's about twice the money, and won't let me use my old PC133 RAM. I was trying to go cheap on this upgrade, but I've already spent way more of my time on this than the dollar savings would have been worth. Especially if I now have to put in a whole new MB and reinstall the OS and all software. Hmm maybe 20 hours of messing around to try to save about a hundred bucks. Not a good investment for me so far.

I did get this all from NewEgg, and they've been very good about RMA-ing the first board. Hopefully they'll be just as nice about the second one too. I can't help thinking that we'll soon see some revised drivers or something from Biostar. The fact that my friend's system is running XP and works fine is probably a clue to what's happening. It sounds like folks are having trouble with Win2K and Win98 with this unit.

Hmmm. At least I'm somewhat glad to see that I'm not the only one having trouble with this board. (Not that I'm at all happy that anyone else is having trouble, it just makes me feel like maybe it's not just me)!

Good luck everyone.

J2

 

[tcsenter]

Sorry, I can't help. I'm running the board with Win98SE, on-board Avance AC97 audio, USB scanner and digital camera, with no problems. I've tested the on-board LAN and it worked fine, but I don't use it often so its disabled 95% of the time. I have two new D-Link DFE-530TX+ NICs sitting around in the box so I'm not worried too much about the on-board LAN working.

Still haven't gotten my System Standby function to come back yet, it disappeared from the shut down menu and Power Management applet in Control Panel when I swapped boards. I sent a tech support request to Biostar. Outside of that, the system has been fine.

My CPU temp seem about right; 40'C idle and 48'C under load for a Duron 850.

 

[j2cat]

40 F for CPU temp? Man, it must be cold in your house

Seriously, though. I've tried uninstalling all of the USB devices and then letting the system find them again after installing the 4-in-1 from the CD and also the USB2.0 Driver from the CD. Still the same. The thing runs my scanner and also a printer, but it won't run an outboard USB2.0 Hard Drive, and the scanner sends the data really realllllly slow. Like ten or twenty times slower than it did on the old system that this new motherboard is replacing. The scanner and old system are only USB1.1. I don't relish the thought of a scan that used to take about a minute now taking more like a half an hour.

There must be some problem with Win2K and the USB on this board using the drivers I've got. Maybe someone else out there is running Win2K and has figured out the right driver combination to get the USB going. Since my add-on PCI LAN card works fine, I really am not concerned about getting the on-board LAN to work.

I put in an email to Biostar when I first started having problems about a week ago, but nothing from them about it yet. At that time it was the Chinese New Year and they were supposedly shut down for the holiday. I don't know how long it might be before they could have a chance to start going through their (no doubt) enormous volume of emails.

Now I've got to decide if I should give up on this board and send it in before NewEgg's 30 day warranty is up (getting the replacement board is said to not extend the warranty even though technically I just bought a second board and sent the old one back separately for a refund. I'm not sure how they'd handle this if push came to shove. In my experience, cross-shipping is when they send out a replacement along with an RMA and a prepaid shipping sticker to send back the old one. That's not what happened here. In this case, I had to ship the old unit back at my expense and it was all handled as if it were two separate transactions; one new purchase and (hopefully) one refund on a different purchase. So far, though, NewEgg has been really great. I can see why they can't afford to do true cross-shipping and I can't complain.

Anyone using the M7VIGPro with Win2K out there?

Thanks everyone. I'll let you know if and when I figure out what I'm doing wrong or if I find out conculsively that it's some other problem.

J2

 

[tcsenter]

40 F for CPU temp? Man, it must be cold in your house

Haha, yeah that's just my CPU temp, there's frost all over my case!

I corrected my flub. lol!

Have you tried disabling ACPI? Just taking a shot in the dark. Every time I get a glitch I can't solve, that's one of the things I resort to, and a few times it worked. Good old APM never results in half the sh-t ACPI seems to.

 

[OatMan]

M7VIG Pro BIOS - Several others have reported the same change in CPU temps in other threads and at other sites. Some have also suggested it may not be the correct BIOS for this board. Unfortunately My Flash was FUBARed.

USB & LAN - My USB never recognized any device (USB cable modem, USB ZIP-100), I also had the same LAN issues - including the odd "media not connected". I however had installed WinXP w/ SP1 - so perhaps your friend got a good one. Since I can't get online I can't do windows update for newer drivers and such. The provided drivers also failed to improve things for me...

Audio Conflict - I don't have speakers so I couldn't test this, but I didn't have the Avance or whatever, my on-board lan began with a "C" i think. Anyway perhaps the boards with the Avance chip are the ones that work!

Anyone running this board with no issues care to post what Audio chip is on board?

 

[Remedy]

I also had to RMA my M7VIG Pro this week. (or tommorow) For a non boot issue. Basically it's electrically faulty. Boots up and then shuts down before POST with infinite beep looping. I purchased mine from TCWO last week. I'd heard a rumor that there is a bad batch of boards floating around in the 1.xx revision. I'll post more info as it becomes available.

 

[OatMan]

Got my RMA.

LAN works no prob. Setting up usb and audio next, but I think the rumor of a bad batch of boards may be true...

I also noticed that the BIOS that killed my board "vig1114b.bin" is now removed from the BIOSTAR website. looks like they reverted back to "vig1113b.bin" I'm still not flashing unless I have to, screw the temp readings...

guess i'm not the only one that bombed out the board on the update.
will update more soon...

Remede - did you get your RMA???

***edit*** forgot to check back... The second board (RMA) was a dream. just sent it too its new home. gonna try another one for a friend with a valcanoe 9, HyperX PC300 mem and a 1700+Bbred. I'll use his current case, hdd, and such. swaping in the Directron deal 300W Lite-on PS and viola! Pentium 166 -----> 333DDR and 2+ GHz for $200! its like a time machine trip from 1994 to 2002. A true AT Hot deals special!!!

of course this assumes I can just flip the FSB to 166 and go. It has a 1/5 divider so it should work, but with no voltage options, who knows, its still a good deal at default speeds.

 

[tcsenter]

I've re-flashed the Bios with what seemed to be the latest version from the Biostar site (VIG1014b.bin) and that bios doesn't even show the enable/disable for the LAN, so it's obviously not the proper Bios for this board (despite it being the one linked to for it on Biostar's site).

Biostar has only recently posted its BIOS for the M7VIG Pro, within the last five to seven days. I've been checking every few days for a couple weeks. It still isn't available on USA server, only the Taiwan server. What's interesting, is the available updates for M7VIG are different between the USA and Taiwan servers.

M7VIG - Taiwan server:

vig1014.exe (284 kb)

vig1014f.exe (268 kb)

M7VIG - USA server:

vig0806B.ZIP (218 kb)

vig0806F.ZIP (206kb)

M7VIG PRO - Taiwan:

vig1113b.exe (276 kb)

vig1113f.exe (264 kb)

M7VIG PRO - USA:

None Posted

Biostar sent me BETA BIOS version vig1018f to solve the Standby Power Management issue I was having, but it didn't solve it after updating. I'm going to try to install Windows again on this BIOS.

 

[j2cat]

Hello all.

Sorry it's taken so long to report back to this forum, but here's what's happend with my Motherboard:

Right after I sent off my last post to this forum, I checked my email and I had a reply from Biostar USA waiting. The gentleman who replied confirmed that the bios version that I had flashed the vigPro with was the wrong version. At the time of that email, he said that the correct bios was not yet on their site so he sent the right version as an attachment. Here is a quote from his email to me:

"First of all, I believe that I need to explain to you the bios you download from internet is the wrong bios. M7VIG is not M7VIG Pro. They are using different BIOSs. So, dont use VIG1014B.BIN on M7VIG Pro motherboard. For M7VIG Pro, you need to use VIG1113F.PRO (see attachment). The VIG Pro bios is not post up to internet yet."

I copied that VIG1113F.PRO to a floppy and used the built-in bios upgrade feature to reflash the board.

Before I flashed it, though, I just had to know what version of bios my board came with from the factory.

Since the darn thing displays for only a brief time as you reboot, and my monitor is never up to visible brightness before it's gone, I used a sneaky trick suggested by a friend. I disconnected the floppy drive before booting. That generates an error and the boot-up stops and complains. That gives you a chance to read the information, including the bios version.

My board came from the factory with VIG1113b.PRO installed.

After flashing the board with the new bios version, it still behaved exactly the same as it did before. Everything was fine except no on-board LAN and problems with the USB.

I then sent and received a reply to another email to Biostar, and he said that I should try doing a clean reinstall of windows. Knowing that it would be an all-nighter to do this, I put it off until last night. I formatted the drive and started over with Win2000 and service pack 3, and then just the drivers that came on the CD with the motherboard. No downloaded drivers, no updated stuff from Microsoft.

Guess what! It all works just fine now.

I'm not sure if the new Bios is what fixed things or if there was something corrupt in my first Windows installation. Regardless, the USB and the on-board LAN now work just great. I've installed all of the "Windows Update" stuff and everything still works. Thank heaven for DSL. I'll bet I downloaded at least 60 meg of updates.

At this point, the only strangeness that I've got is with the secondary IDE controller and its two CD drives.

When I first put this system together, I installed a brand-new CDRW burner (48X generic one from Office Max) and an old, plain cd drive so we'd have two drives in case we wanted to copy directly from cd to cd.

All of the time I was installing things, the cd drives acted strangely, speeding up, slowing down, having errors, failing to autorun, etc. The event log for Win2K showed bad sectors and all manner of CD reading errors.

I replaced BOTH cd drives. Using an old, reliable 16X CDRW burner that I'd had, and a newer (but already tested from a different machine) 50X plain cd drive. I also used a new IDE cable just in case, and I used a different pair of power cables from the power supply, and I measured the +12 and +5 at these connectors, even with the system powered and under load ...... right on the money.

Still, with this new mobo, new drives, new cables, etc., it acted the same. Strange, erratic behavior from the cd drives. I had the burner set to be master and the cd drive set to be slave. Both on the secondary IDE bus.

To try to get things working right, I just disconnected the plain CD drive leaving only the CDRW burner connected. With that setup, it seems to work fine!

So, I'm wondering if there is a problem on the mobo, or something I've got set up wrong that's creating some sort of conflict with the two CD drives. I've never had this problem on any other system. I routinely use two CD drives in each computer just in case I want to copy cd to cd. I've got a DVDRW burner and a CDRW burner peacfully coexisting in my main system, and they work just great even though I had to set the DVDRW drive to be slave when the installation instructions clearly state that they want to have it be the master. (I can't very well have both burners being master, after all)!

Anyhow, the new M7VigPro system is now working just fine (sans the extra CD drive), and NewEgg has supposedly received my RMAed board (which probably had nothing electrically wrong with it, if I had to guess).

I'm pretty impressed with Biostar's support since I actually got an email reply in a short time after sending in my request for help. Lots of these places just blow you off and you never hear anything from them. I'm also happy enough with NewEgg (though I don't have my credit yet, I'm sure it'll be forthcoming).

Hopefully BioStar has updated their various sites so they link you to the correct BIOS files for the M7VigPro now. It is odd that the two sites have different stuff shown for thse boards and stranger still that they actually linked you to the wrong bios for the "pro" board. They need to get that all straightened out or they'll be getting lots of returned boards and lots of questions. Maybe they've already fixed it at this point.

I guess I'm reasonably happy with things now. I wish I knew what the deal was with not working well with two CD drives, but I can live with just one installed in this system. None of this has been a properly conducted experiment (too many variables being changed at any one time), so I'm left not really knowing what the problems and solutions really were. I suppose it's possible that I've still got a bad motherboard. It's also possible that there's nothing wrong with it or my first one, and it's all been bios, driver, and corrupt installation from CDs to blame. Who knows!

Happy computing everyone.

J2

 

[Remedy]

I got my board back from RMA today and works really nice. Love it and higly recommend it.