Onboard IDE Problems Solved! Future KT333 builders look here

[Chronic321]

Many KT333 owners have been having IDE problems, specifically running both onboard ports in DMA mode with Windows XP. My board, the Asus A7V333 was also having a problem with this. I tried, everything, different cables, reseating cables, disabling device in bios, etc... Nothing worked, Windows XP would at first detect the device on the primary port as a UDMA 2 device (DVD ROM) but within 4 reboots would always drop it to PIO mode, this was the result of many errors. Well, this problem has been solved. In the BIOS there is setting to define the intterupt mode of the board, APIC or PIC. APIC is a relatively new standard designed for XP/2000 and gives the system a total of 24 IRQ's. I switched it to PIC, reinstalled Windows as Windows would not boot with the mode changed and now everything is fine. My hard drive is running at UDMA 6 with no errors in the event log, and my DVD ROM was logging errors every use before now stays at UDMA 2 with no errors. So people having problems using both IDE ports correctly may want to try this also.

 

[NicColt]

what is the boards default APIC or PIC ?

 

[Chronic321]

APIC