I've been fighting with this board for a good 4 days now and have virtually eliminated all possible causes yet still recieve the following errors. Windows 2000 Clean Installation will not load the drivers for the RAID drives when F6 is pressed. It reads the disk, detects the promise Fasttrak100 lite files, seems to use them but then says I have no hard drives at all.
Windows 98 however, will boot fine from that raid setup (freakin fast too). It will detect the Promise Raid Controller, I install the drivers, Restart and then Windows will not boot back up... waiting 30 seconds it will auto restart, load Win98 and checking the Control Panel shows the Raid Controller has been disabled as it caused windows to stop responding. (but I can still access all 78 Gig of my 2 IBM GX60 40Gig hard drives.)
Next OS attempt was to "upgrade" this Win98 installation with Win2k. Upon reboot and entering the blue setup screens F6, it asks for the Promise drivers, loads them, asks me to press enter to continue installing windows and sumarily Dies with the error: "Boot_Device_Inaccessible". At this point no recovery is possible so I reformatted and installed Win98 again using a bootdisk.
Next OS attempt was installing Win2k on a separate non Raid drive and then activate the Raid array as a non-booting super large drive. Windows installation went flawlessly. All system components detected and drivers installed. Raid Controller drivers also installed, no apparent error BUT. The drives DON'T show up on the system.
I am beginning to think I have some sort of defective motherboard (at least Promise Raid chip) The array is detected as functional in bios, and I can manipulate files on it just fine. There is some massive incompatibility issue though and I cannot fix it. Even clearing the CMOS and systematically changing settings does nothing.
The only thing I have left to try is Flashing the BIOS. (Current Bios Date is 7/17/2001) Both Soyo Bios available online are newer than this so there is hope, but everyone out there with the Dragon I'd appreciate some ideas on what more to try and also if this does in fact sound hardware related.
The only other far fetched theories I've had are the possibility of a crushed core on the Athlon (I haven't dared check this but my cooler did snap down a little harshly during installation... yet no errors in Win98 operations and no errors (except RAID) in Win2000 Operation so I'd rule this out personally. And I have no thermal compound on the Chipset. Due to the fact that I'm waiting for a shipment of Arctic Silver II and a new Vantec HSF to replace the less powerful Mini-SuperOrb I've been using during this trouble shooting week. So, I know these specifications are not uncommon, I know jumpers are active, FDisk is reporting the full drive space, and I am virtually out of options... so in summary.... HELP!
My current system configuration:
AMD Athlon 1.4 Ghz (48 deg C and stable)
768 MB Crucial PC2100 DDR
Bios Settings Performance: Maximum
Boot Sequence: Floppy, CDROM, SCSI
Secondary IDE Master: HP 9300i CDburner
Gainward GeForce 3 in AGP slot (appeture set to 256 MB agp 4x)
No PCI slots filled.
Lan: ON (and working)
Sound: ON (and working)
USB: ON (and working)
Windows 98 however, will boot fine from that raid setup (freakin fast too). It will detect the Promise Raid Controller, I install the drivers, Restart and then Windows will not boot back up... waiting 30 seconds it will auto restart, load Win98 and checking the Control Panel shows the Raid Controller has been disabled as it caused windows to stop responding. (but I can still access all 78 Gig of my 2 IBM GX60 40Gig hard drives.)
Next OS attempt was to "upgrade" this Win98 installation with Win2k. Upon reboot and entering the blue setup screens F6, it asks for the Promise drivers, loads them, asks me to press enter to continue installing windows and sumarily Dies with the error: "Boot_Device_Inaccessible". At this point no recovery is possible so I reformatted and installed Win98 again using a bootdisk.
Next OS attempt was installing Win2k on a separate non Raid drive and then activate the Raid array as a non-booting super large drive. Windows installation went flawlessly. All system components detected and drivers installed. Raid Controller drivers also installed, no apparent error BUT. The drives DON'T show up on the system.
I am beginning to think I have some sort of defective motherboard (at least Promise Raid chip) The array is detected as functional in bios, and I can manipulate files on it just fine. There is some massive incompatibility issue though and I cannot fix it. Even clearing the CMOS and systematically changing settings does nothing.
The only thing I have left to try is Flashing the BIOS. (Current Bios Date is 7/17/2001) Both Soyo Bios available online are newer than this so there is hope, but everyone out there with the Dragon I'd appreciate some ideas on what more to try and also if this does in fact sound hardware related.
The only other far fetched theories I've had are the possibility of a crushed core on the Athlon (I haven't dared check this but my cooler did snap down a little harshly during installation... yet no errors in Win98 operations and no errors (except RAID) in Win2000 Operation so I'd rule this out personally. And I have no thermal compound on the Chipset. Due to the fact that I'm waiting for a shipment of Arctic Silver II and a new Vantec HSF to replace the less powerful Mini-SuperOrb I've been using during this trouble shooting week. So, I know these specifications are not uncommon, I know jumpers are active, FDisk is reporting the full drive space, and I am virtually out of options... so in summary.... HELP!
My current system configuration:
AMD Athlon 1.4 Ghz (48 deg C and stable)
768 MB Crucial PC2100 DDR
Bios Settings Performance: Maximum
Boot Sequence: Floppy, CDROM, SCSI
Secondary IDE Master: HP 9300i CDburner
Gainward GeForce 3 in AGP slot (appeture set to 256 MB agp 4x)
No PCI slots filled.
Lan: ON (and working)
Sound: ON (and working)
USB: ON (and working)
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