New HD is going mad when I install the VIA 4in1 drivers. :(

[MrGrim]

My brother just got himself a new HD, a Seagate Barracuda II 7200RPM. He has an Asus P3V-133 which has a VIA Apollo133 chipset. As soon as I install the VIA 4in1 drivers (tried both 4.25a and 4.26) the HD goes mad. It takes 10 minutes to load into windows (dual bot win98 & win2k) and the drive sounds like it's constantly being accessed even when it doesn't have to be.

As soon as I unistall them it's fine.

What is up with that? It was fine with the old HD. Could it have something to do with it being ATA/66?

Thanx in advance

 

[DeathroweR]

Can't tell you about that, but I have a friend who after installing 4in1 couldn't install DX8 - system would crash every time.

 

[larrymoencurly]

I've had so many problems with 4in1 drivers, even with no ATA66 HD or controller, that I never install their bus mastering driver, just the other stuff.

 

[MrGrim]

So what do you recon? Will it be alright without the 4in1 drivers? Right now NOTHING is installed. It's running fine ...

 

[MassMhz]

See if disabling DMA helps.

 

[ahfung]

You don't need VIA ATAPI driver for both Win98SE and 2000. They have built-in driver which is much much better than VIA in term of compatibility and similar performance.

 

[igowerf]

I remember reading that Via boards like their drivers installed in a certain order, I think. Maybe it was some other hardware. I can't even remember where I read that.

 

[chiwawa626]

i installed them now when i use nero to burn from HD to burner, i get SCSI error? WTF!

 

[JellyBaby]

Ditto what larrymoencurly said.

 

[chiwawa626]

thanks, fixed it!

 

[dcdomain]

The drivers worked great for me, I really noticed the improvement in performance. But then I had the same problems as chiwawa626, my system looked at the drives as if they were scsi, so Nero and almost any other CDR software aside from Adaptec's wouldn't work. I even tried installing ASPI layers... nothing worked. Didn't even bother to try running the DVD drive.

chiwawa626: Sounds like you came up with a fix? What did you do? Did you just uninstall them? Recently formatted and didn't bother installing them yet. Rather take the performance hit...

 

[MrGrim]

So nobody knows what the problem exactly is? From what I hear the Via 4in1 drivers really improve the performance, and decrease the CPU utilization, especially in Win2K.

 

[John]

Since I now run a VIA chipset I did a clean install of Win2K and ran the 4.26 4-in-1's. Like the rest of you that installed them in Win2K, it sets the IDE devices as SCSI. I could no longer burn cd's or watch dvd's. I went to add/remove and uninstalled the VIA busmaster driver and that seemed to fix everything. I had also decided to install DX8 because I am always trying to keep the system "up to date". Unfortunately I was getting random lockups in 3d apps using my Prophet Pro and the 6.47 reference drivers. I decided to do a (yet another) clean install of Win2K, but this time I installed the 4.27's without the busmaster driver. I also chose NOT install DX8 this time. My system is running stable without lockups, and I am very pleased.

 

[dcdomain]

John, so when you uninstalled the Via bus master drive, it basically meant that your system never had the thing installed in the first place right? So you took the performance hit? Or did you somehow retain the performance and got rid of the problem?

 

[John]

No, it reverted to the original Win2k via busmaster driver. I lost no performance because I run a PCI promise raid controller. I have no need for onboard ata100 support.