Need info on Tyan Tiger MP bios upgrade, others

[cheesewhiz]

Hey --

My main concern, is that i'm using the dual athalon xp's on this system, and if I upgrade the bios, I want to make sure they'll still run in dual mode. I haven't heard anything to the contrary, but I wanted to check to see what you guys think. Also, I want to know if you had any ideas for my booting woes.

Booting problems:

few problems here. First, my computer used to work just fine. Lately it's been crashing after running for a while, no idea why. I started taking out components like the sound card, etc, but nothing worked. Then, my hard drive stopped booting. I've got windows xp installed on there. I booted to a recovery cd, entered the recovery console, did the fixmbr and fixboot, rebooted, and the hd still didn't boot. I let the cd reinstall an xp in a different folder, hd still won't boot, it goes straight to the cd and starts loading that. I verified in the bios that the cd is set after the hard drive, so it's like it doesnt see the hard drive as bootable at all. One problem i see, whatever is set as master on the first ide channel, shows up 4 times in the bios under "hard drives." When the 40gb hd is set as master, it shows up 4 times, but never boots. The cd drive won't boot to the cd either. When i put the cd drive as the master on the first channel, and the hd as the master on the second channel, the cd boots every time, and it shows up under the HD listings in the bios as bootable devices.

So, it's a mess.. I want to upgrade the bios to the latest version (it's still on 1.02, the initial version), and I'm going to use a different hard drive. I'm thinking that maybe the hard drive is going dead (consistently losing mbr on reboot?), or maybe the onboard ide controller is freaking out, so i'm going to use a promise ata/100 and put the hard drives on that.

 

[Steve]

What speed are the Athlon XPs?

Tiger MP's voltage regulation does not support higher than 1900+ (1.6GHz) CPUs.

 

[cheesewhiz]

they're 1600+ chips, so that shouldn't be a problem.

 

[Steve]

The ATA card isn't a bad idea, but you may want to check the jumpering of your drives again, and try different settings.

As long as the CPUs are reporting themselves to the BIOS as MPs, I don't think an upgrade will hurt you.

 

[cheesewhiz]

Yeah, I don't think so..

but i did get it booting.. i unplugged it, popped out the battery, and set the clear cmos jumper.. f'd things up (when it rebooted i got a black screen with 3 large blue blocks.. thought i really messed that up..)

i think it freaked because i put it back together the same way i took it apart: replaced the cmos jumper, battery, then power. The second time, i unplugged it, popped out the battery, set the clear cmos jumper, let it sit for about 10 minutes, put the battery in, let it sit for about 5 more, plugged the power back in, let it sit for 5 more, then unset the clear cmos jumper.. now it's booting properly and everything. I'm going to reinstall windows and/or install linux so i'll see if it freaks out with a clean install.

 

[Steve]

How strong is your power supply? And have you tested your RAM? That chipset was a bit buggy and could freak out if your parts were not quite in A+ condition.

 

[cheesewhiz]

Well, I think i'm starting to see that problem now..

After I got it booting, I plugged in a network card, it booted fine. Went to reboot for a windowsupdate update, and it hung on the POST again. It always seems to hang after it detects the hard drives, etc. but before the boot summary screen.

I've basically determined that whenever I want to reboot, I have to clear the cmos and take the battery out, etc. I think I'm just going to part it out and get a single processor machine, this kind of crap just isn't worth it. it's the second in a row amd system i've had trouble with, i may be going back to intel

as for the power supply, i have an antec 430 watt power supply, really a pretty good beast. I'm going to try to go barebones with this again and see if i can get it rebooting reliably... i'll try to keep this thread updated.

 

[Steve]

Don't forget about www.memtest.org and maybe check your CPU cooling too.

Did you get that BIOS updated? That may help.