To all successful MSI Pro2A owners!! A little help!!!!

[nubomb]

Just put together my first system and it's not all that stable. I don't believe its any hardware problems probably just user error(newbie). First problem I had was DVD crashed system...I changed AGP from 4X to 2X and this solved my problem so far only watched one movie(DMA is enabled). I stil get windows protection errors once in a while and the newest error I got was a problem writing to my harddrive while playing Need for Speed. I ran diagnostic test on harddrive and everything is OK there. I'm thinking I installed wrong/bad drivers, or in wrong order or something. I used all the latest drivers Via, Graphic card, etc.

My question is what 4in1 drivers did you install, did you do anything special, in a particular order, seperate IDE drivers. Also how did you install the hardware all at once, Vid card first then sound. I'm going to do a fresh install for everything and I want to get it right.

Something else I noticed people having sucess with this mobo seem to be using Win2000......Do you see a problem with Win98SE, should I get 2000.

Don't know what else to tell you....HD Master Primary....CD/DVD Master Secondary. Do you need any other info? Thanks for any help/suggestions.

AMD 900 TBird (not planning on OC)
MSI Pro2A ( BIOS that came with board, not updated, version???)
PC133 128 Cas3
ATI AIW 128PRO AGP
WD 20.5g HD 7200 ata66
SB Live MP3+
External HP CD R/RW 2x4x12x
Win 98SE

 

[RoboTECH]

Ultimate foolproof method:

1) Start with a "barebones" system - floppy, 1 HDD (master), motherboard, RAM (1 stick - unless you know both sticks and all your RAM slots are good), CD-ROM (slave), video card, PS2 mouse and keyboard, and CPU only (no sound card, SCSI cards, modems, NIC's, CD-RW, zip drive, etc)

2) Boot to BIOS, disable AGP by setting AGP aperture to 4

3) Turn off all ACPI garbage

4) Disable your serial ports, your parallel ports, USB ports and your 2ndary IDE controller

5) Install windows

6) Install Via 4-in-1's (4.24 was the version I used for the last install I did - about a month ago, sorry)

7) Install video drivers

8) Upgrade to DX8 (if necessary)

9) Go into BIOS and enable your ports and controllers that you need from step 4 (if you don't need it, don't enable it)

10) Install cards, 1 by 1, and test

a) Your motherboard manual has a detailed description of what PCI slots will share which IRQ's. Start off by sticking your NICs (especially if you have a 3Com) into an unshared slot
b) Install soundcard into unshared slot (if possible)
c) SCSI cards
d) Modem

11) When you have something shared, you MUST test it specifically

i.e. let's say you stick a soundcard into a PCI slot that shares IRQs with the ATA100 controller. Play an mp3 or a wav while you copy your windows CD to your hard drive. If you have a NIC in PCI1, then make sure you try to transfer files over a network while playing a 3d game, etc.

spend a day testing each step of the way to resolve any issues along the way. That will save you a lot of time in the future.

BTW, I had no problems with ME, 98 or 2k and the pro2a

 

[nubomb]

Robo Thanks I'll give it a shot this weekend.

A couple more things

Step 1: I got it

Step 2: Disable AGP 4X and set aperture size to 4 or leave enabled and
set to 4. After entire setup is done should I leave these settings alone? or change them?

Step 3: Turning of ACPI crap - do I just disable IPCA Function in Power Manaegement Setup or do I need to do more?

I understand all the rest BUT where in the Manual does it show which slots share IRQ's? I must be overlooking something. Right now I will only have a Vid card, sound card, and Nic card for DSL.

Are there any web sites that describe each BIOS setting in more detail. Should I play with anything else in the BIOS.

Thanks again.

 

[haslup]

Hey Robo,

Thanks for that post... I've been having problems with my new Pro2A and just started the re-do process... I'll follow your list and hopefully I'll be ok!

Thanks,

jason

 

[nubomb]

Jason,

Reply back to this thread when your done and let us know how it turned out. I'll do the same.

 

[haslup]

So far so good... just installed Win98SE, the Via 4.28 stuff, video driver (geforce2 gts), and directx8. I'm going to start putting in my PCI cards now, but for the life of me I can't find in the manual something that tells me which slots are shared... where's that in the manual?

Thanks,

jason

 

[haslup]

And the fun continues...

One of the major reasons for me redoing my install was because I was having problems with my CD drive and CD-RW drive... clonecd (and nero, and adaptec) could never read from either of the drive... it'd start it up, then immediately start reporting errors. I had the latest VIA drivers, tried both enabling and disabling DMA, but still no go...

So yesterday, before I had installed my network card and possibly my sound card, I tried clonecd with my creative 52x CD... and it worked! I was very happy, thinking that I had fixed the problem. But then I installed something that caused it to go back to it's normal non-reading self... very frustrating! Since then I've tried every combo of DMA, via drivers, primary master/slave secondary master/slave etc... not quite sure what to do next.

Anyhow, I've got my SoundBlaster Live XGamer 5.1 in pci slot 2, VisionTek Geforce 2 in agp, adaptec 2940uw in pci slot 4, and a 3com nic in slot 5. 2 scsi drives, an hp 9350i as primary master, and a creative 52x as secondary master...

jason

 

[nubomb]

Still can't get mine going right. Everything works great until I enable the onboard USB in the BIOS and load USB drivers. Then everything gets screwed, NIC card no longer works can't connect DSL. I disable the USB everything works great. Are the different drivers to install for USB? Very confused???? No IRQ sharing problems, going to give it another try.

 

[haslup]

nubomb,

I found this after searching on deja:


> Check out
>
> http://www.athlonmb.com/ubbhtml/Forum12/HTML/000032.html
>
> In summary:
>
> PIN 1 AGP
> PIN 2 PCI SLOT 1 (shares with PCI Slot 4)
> PIN 3 PCI SLOT 2 (shares with on board sound)
> PIN 4 PCI SLOT 3 (shares with USB)
> PIN 2 PCI SLOT 4 (shares with Slot 1)
> PIN 3 PCI SLOT 5 (shares with on board sound)
> PIN 4 PCI SLOT 6 (shares with USB)

Is your nic card in slot 3 or 6? My nic is working fine in slot 5.

I was just spectacting in Q3/TA for about an hour online... 3d was fast, nic was great...

I'm beginning to think my clonecd issues are with the cd I was testing with (links 2001 which is protected) or my drives aren't fully supported (I thought at least the HP 9350i was). I was just able to create an image of my SBLive CD with clonecd just fine...

I never disabled onboard USB, but I did disable everything else (serial and parallel ports). I haven't attached any of my USB devices, though.

jason

 

[nubomb]

Ok Nic card is in slot 4, sound card slot 2, and vid card is in AGP slot, thats all i have. I now can enable USB and get on the net. What I did I have no clue?? When i plug in USB game controller nothing happens so I still have a problem. Still playing around, I will get it soon. Thanks for the info

 

[haslup]

I'll try some USB stuff tonight...

I'm almost afraid to plug things in now. I bought Norton's Ghost, so I'm going to try and create a stable image so I can always fall back to that. I've had some problems with Ghost, though... is anything ever easy?

Good luck & more later...

jason

 

[Esquire]

any updates, i'm about to go, for this and you have helped me big time
thanks

 

[Esquire]

oh, i'm gonna do an ati radeon and sb live dvd 30gig maxtor d-link nic and win2k any problems?
disable intergrated sound? hard? in bios?

 

[FloridaBoy]

haslup/nubomb,

I had something similar happen. After installing VIA 4in1 drivers, my Creative DVD ROM drive couldn't read anything. It would simply hang up and the light on DVD drive would go off and on. When I uninstalled the ATAPI drivers within the 4in1, the drive has worked fine since then.

 

[Mattster]

Esquire: I recently built a box for my brother, using this board, an AIW Radeon, Linksys 10/100 NIC, Sound Blaster Live! MP3 5.1, US Robotics 56k PCI (2977, not the winmodem), and IBM 45GB hard drive. I was browsing the forums over at rage3d.com and stumbled across this installation helper. Went through all the steps, except I didn't install DirectX8 or the beta driver.

Sfuller posted this over @ rage3d.com:

Here's what I did, YMMV:

* Started Win2K install, pressed F5, then F6 at the "press F6 to load a storage driver" prompt.
* Chose Standard PC and installed my Hipoint driver
* Ran through the install of Win2K
* Immediately after the win2k install, I installed the following VIA drivers from ViaHardware: INF 1.02B, AGP404, NIRQ 1.3A. I did not reboot until after all 3 were installed.
* After this reboot, I installed the following Win2K HotFixes: Q260233 & Q261606. I waited to reboot until the second one was installed.
* Installed the drivers for my SB Live 5.1 off of the CD and rebooted.
* Installed the drivers and all utils off my ATI CD. The CD is software release 1.04. Rebooted after this was done.
* Tested TV and DVD playback. Both worked fine
* Enabled DMA on CD-R and DVD drives and rebooted
* Tested TV and DVD playback. Both worked fine
* Installed Win2K SP1. Rebooted.
* Tested TV and DVD playback. Both worked fine
* Installed remaining compatibility updates, high encryption pack and rebooted.
* Tested TV and DVD playback. Both worked fine
* Installed DX 8.0A and rebooted
* Tested TV and DVD playback. Both worked fine. TV looked funny (red and blue seemed a little out of sync on fast motion).
* Installed latest DirectX 8 special purpose driver from ATI and rebooted.
* Tested TV and DVD playback. Both worked fine

My current reported driver version is 5.13.01.3100
Current Build # is D7.20-0110b-119E-ATI
Current Desktop is 4.12.2489

The only issues that I have now are with capture of video off of the TV. I lose sound as soon as I hit the record button and I don't get it back until I restart the TV app. The resulting video also has no sound.

Hope this helps someone....

My current setup:

Abit KT7A - 1Ghz Tbird (7.5 multiplier and 133Mhz Bus)
256MB of PC-150 RAM (Kingmax Tiny BGA)
2 x WD 400BB 40GB ATA-100 drives (RAID - 0)
SB Live 5.1
3 Com 10/100 PCI NIC
ATI Radeon AIW (non retail)
Iomega 12x10x32 ATAPI CDR (Master on Primary Channel)
Generic 6X ATAPI DVD drive (Master on Secondary channel)


The only things I did different:
1. Disabled AGP 4x
2. Didn't download DX8 or beta driver. Used drivers from install CD
3. Use VIA AGP v4.05 from viahardware.com, along with the other drivers he suggested from that site as well.

The end result was a very stable system, with all features functional, no lockups or issues with CDRW or DVD's......

Hope this helps!

 

[Esquire]

aces
thank u

 

[jpprod]

Problem you have described has been reproduced by several members of this BBS, myself included, with the K7Tpro-2A. I eventually ended up switching my motherboard to a different one (Asus A7pro) because of the issue, but I managed to get video playback/heavy-duty harddisk activity stable on the K7Tpro-2A motherboard my installing latest VIA IDE drivers (3011 beta) in miniport mode.

Judging from the symphtoms I had, the problem is clearly connected to K7Tpro-2A's instability during loads of PCI transactions. I'm certain that there are many members of this board who disagree with me and claim that the K7Tpro-2A is a flawless mobo, but based on the sheer number of problems I've heard of and the consistency of these incidents, I'm confident that there is something horribly wrong with at least a certain revision of the motherboard.

Here's how the things were on my K7Tpro-2A:
- Movie playback locked up computer within a few minutes, unless DMA on hard disk was disabled. Note that during movie playback there's heavy-duty PCI traffic going on because of video overlay, streaming of video + audio data off DMA-enabled mass storage device and uploading an audio stream onto the sound device.
- Copying large files from one hard disk or partition to another, or over 100mbbs LAN randomly locked up the computer. There aren't much more PCI-intensive tasks than this.
- Games ran perfectly, not one crash. This is not surpricing, since there's hardly any PCI-activity going on during gameplay.
- BIOS patches, disabling AGP4X, removing sound card, utilizing integrated sound over SB Live or using any revision of video drivers for my GeForce had no impact on the problem whatsoever. Neither did a full, clean install of Win98.

As for how the beta miniport IDE drivers managed to stabilize the hard-disk operations, I can only make a more-or-less educated guess... Miniport drivers might use PCI-bus more efficiently than standard IDE busmaster drivers - they may buffer the data prior to a PCI transaction, and thus stress the bus less.

 

[Esquire]

mattster thanks trying this now.
did you disable the usb & sieral port et.?
thanks again

 

[Esquire]

http://www.viatech.com/drivers/index.htm
the drivers a via