Upgrade gone to hell w/AMD... Help!

[AskPriz]

I've had problems with AMD products not working right for me in the past (since the 486 days), but with all the hype and such, I decided to take the plunge. ack!

I have a 933mhz P3, 256mb RAM, geforce 4 ti-4200 setup. Fry's had a ECS K7S5A Pro mobo w/AMD Athlon XP 2200+ CPU for $129. I had a xmas gift certificate for $50 and been kinda short on money lately, but at these prices, I decided it was time to upgrade.

In the past, I've stuck to Intel with no problems. Especially when upgrading, just doing the repair install and all my settings stay intact in XP. So I stuck in the new CPU/mobo and such and booted up to the WinXP cd setup. That's where my problems started.

In a nutshell, it all seems to work ok except when I'm trying to select where to put XP. I can't do a repair install, it doesn't recognize my partitions as being usable by XP.

I see a box where I can create/delete partions which reads something like:

7931mb Disk 0 at Id 0 on bus 0 on atapi [MBR]

Unpartitioned space 7930mb

43975mb Disk 0 at Id 0 on bus 0 on atapi [MBR]
Unpartitioned space 43974mb

If I try to create or do anything with the 43gb "space", it says I need to do something with the 7gb part (this is all 1 40gb drive btw) If I try to create something with the 7gb part, it'll try to format it and fail, saying the drive is damaged.

I've tried this with my other hd, zeroed out this drive, played with it in fdisk (it formatted ok with a win98 boot disk), etc... but I can't get any further in XP. It's really pissing me off. I may have lost all data on both drives in the process. (I backed up only the essential stuff beforehand.)

Can anyone help me on how to fix this? Or should I just try to return it to Fry's and save up for a better setup?

Thanks in advance...
-Kent

 

[Lord Evermore]

I don't think this is due to AMD or the new hardware, despite the coincidence. It certainly isn't due to a widespread issue with AMD, though it's possible one piece of the new stuff is defective.

Even after you zeroed out the hard drive (assuming with the manufacturer's utility), it still shows the 7GB and 43GB partitions? It really just sounds like the partition table is screwed up (I've had one 20GB drive reported as being 300GB once because of that).

Have you tried plugging it back into the P3 motherboard? You can just plug in the basic parts and the power cables without having to mount it back into the case. This way you can see if it only happens on this board.

Did you use Partition Magic or some other utility to modify or create the partitions originally? Very often, PM at least results in partition tables that isn't quite right, even though it "works".

What's funny is ECS barely admits to even making a K7S5A Pro on their site. It's not in a product list, there is no user manual download for it. Only a BIOS update.

 

[AskPriz]

Ok. So I've put the old 933 back in and reinstalled windows on the drive and it worked fine.

I realized that the 43gb thing is my other drive... but while the 933 setup sees the C: drive (the 40gb) as a 39gb drive, the AMD setup only sees it as 7gb and has trouble formatting it.

Now I also have to find some good app to undelete that 43gb so I can recover all the files off it... ^_^

Nope, I didn't use Partition Magic at all. Haven't touched it in years (since it came with some piece of hardware I bought.)

 

[Lord Evermore]

Sounds like a BIOS issue, not "AMD" causing the problems. Or possibly the board's chipset is bad in some way, or the connectors. Or maybe you just need to set the jumpers on the hard drive differently -- sometimes "master" doesn't work but "single drive" does, if the drive has that sort of thing. Or maybe they're on cable select and it's not working right? Do they both show up on the POST screen?

It's very odd that setup is seeing both drives at the disk 0, id 0 spot. However it's very very funny that the 43GB note didn't make you think of your other drive.

 

[Buzzman151]

OMG! *rant time* Don't give me that BS that AMD is the cause of all your problems. I've built 6 or 7 AMD systems ranging from the Duron to XP and have had no major problems w/ any of them!!!! (at least not any problems that were AMD's fualt) How much quality do you expect at $129 for a 2200+ and a mobo? ECS K7S5A = POS so don't go blaming this on AMD. Its just like if you bought an Emachine and wanted to "upgrade" the celeron in it, after the upgrade and you had problems w/ the computer would you blame it on Intel or Emachine? Probably Emachine. *end rant time*

Anyways, was PS do you have in this new system? If what Lord Evermore told you to do doesnt work, then I'd say you pretty much got a lemon mobo.

 

[Peacekeeper100]

I haven't really heard any good things about ECS, athough I don't hear really bad things about them either. I do know that I would blame Fry's. Everything I have every bought from them seems to not work. Do you ever look at the return line when you walk in. There's always a line of 8-10 people when I walk in.

 

[vicwang]

"Its just like if you bought an Emachine and wanted to "upgrade" the celeron in it, after the upgrade and you had problems w/ the computer would you blame it on Intel or Emachine? Probably Emachine."

Well said. An ECS motherboard isn't an "AMD product" any more than a VIA P4 motherboard is an "Intel product". Blaming the CPU manufacturer when the problem clearly lies in the motherboard or elsewhere is pretty ridiculous.

With that said, in my experience ECS boards (specifically the K7S5A) are total pieces of crap. Among myself and friends we have bought four of them, and two were defective. Also if you check out various motherboard forums (esp those at OCworkbench.com) you'll see ridiculous numbers of posters reporting problems with K7S5A boards. Of course part of that is because it is a VERY commmon board, but IMO the number of K7S5A problems being reported are totally disproportionate to the number of users. And when you consider these boards are basically being given away for free, that's a pretty huge red flag right there.

 

[mechBgon]

LOL, you should change your title and put "Microsoft" in place of "AMD." What Windows will or won't do isn't AMD's fault, my friend. And if you expect this beastie to run well, do make sure you're using a quality-brand power supply of 300W or higher or else YMMV.

 

[AskPriz]

Without this turning into a flame war or anything, I have to say I do tend to harbor some slight resentment towards AMD. I lost a lot of (investor, not my own) money in a gaming-related product they were doing that ended up getting axed (which is one of the core causes for the Playstation 1 modem never being released back in early '96). The guys were great to work with on that team, and because my financial situation was really horrible after all was said and done and I was looking for another job that they comped me a 486 dx-4 100 cpu. I plopped the chip into my setup, powered up and toasted my HD. Called support, found out it was a known problem, got the drive replaced, couldn't get the OS to be stable after that. Ever since that, had this or that problem with the chips, helping out various friends and their rigs and stability issues (from the 486 to the K6 to the K6-2 to now). Over the last year or so on the IRC channels I've hung out, I've seen a lot of people brag (as have in the past about the K6/K6-2) about how AMD has changed and now their stuff is rock solid. Some people have bought Athlons and had this or that problem and asked the guys who talked them into buying a AMD for help and they blow them off saying "I don't know what your problem is, my rig runs fine." I do what I can to help people. I've always supported the little guy in the past, from the Apple days (worked on Lemmings, The Killing Game Show, Pick 'n Pile) to supporting the BeOS (was working on the first localized commercial game from Japan for it) to companies like Aureal (Almost worked for them) to now, doing console titles from really small companies that can really use the help to get their game out there and be known. (Side note: One of the titles that I offerred to Aureal back in... '97? '98? that was a really fun/addictive 2 player head-to-head thing just got released here for the PS1, totally hacked up art, but the 2 player part is intact for $9.99 as Sorcerer's Maze). Lately for my computer stuff, I've given up and just gone with the mainstream (Intel, Creative, nVidia) to not worry about it. I have enough other things on my plate to worry about.
So I'm sorry how my previous post came across. I spent around 12 hours pounding away at this problem with nothing but frustration to show for it and was pretty tired by then and felt like I was at the end of my rope (for now I'm running my old rig until I get everything sorted out.)

Evermore: I kept unplugging and plugging in the drives all afternoon/evening, swapping channels and trying to just dump an OS on the end of my D drive hoping it wouldn't erase the files that I thought the secondary wasn't even plugged in when I started to get that message. I have 4 drives (2 hd's, a dvd-rom and a cd-rw) so setting them for cable select or single drive I didn't even consider to be a viable option. But regardless, it tried and couldn't format either drive until when I put back the old hardware, it had no problems at all? Maybe it's just the board. sigh...

Peacekeeper:I didn't know much about the board so I did a google search and found a few reviews like at Tom's hardware and another site or two. They all basically said the same thing: the board is designed to be inexpensive but of all of the ones using the SIS 735 (I think that's the chip on there) chipset, this is the most stable board of the bunch, making me think it was a pretty good deal. A month or so ago, Fry's had a 2.4ghz P4 with ABIT mobo with the SIS chipset (same mobo my friend bought for his rig which has been running smooth) for $240. It was a retail boxed cpu and I knew the mobo was decent... but I just didn't have the money (company problems, and my hours are short so I'm REALLY strapped for cash as of late. I even applied to work at Nokia on the N-Gage and that thing is a PoS (it was abysmal to play at the GDC), if that gives you an idea on how eager I am for better work/income.)

I saw this deal for $129 and after the quick reviews of hearing it was a stable board coupled with a decent fast chip, plus the GC... I thought I was getting a great deal so I went for it yesterday. I have been shopping at Fry's since the first store in Sunnyvale openned in the late 80's and know they usually suck, but there is a good deal now and then.

VicWang: What was the problems you had? Anything like this where it: a> sees the primary master as a 7gb drive (instead of a 40gb) and b> keeps saying my primary slave drive (be it either the Lite-On DVD-Rom or the Lite-On CD-RW, whichever cable I have sitting in the primary ide port) is not ATAPI compatible and refuses to work with it? I've dropped off most forums as of late, I've been to busy. This is the first time I've hit anandtech (outside of the reviews and news section) for a month or two. Things have just been too busy and hectic.

Running a 350w Enermax Power Supply btw.

So, any recommendations on utils to use to restore my recently formatted 45gb D drive?

 

[vicwang]

"VicWang: What was the problems you had? Anything like this where it: a> sees the primary master as a 7gb drive (instead of a 40gb) and b> keeps saying my primary slave drive (be it either the Lite-On DVD-Rom or the Lite-On CD-RW, whichever cable I have sitting in the primary ide port) is not ATAPI compatible and refuses to work with it?"

No, my problem was simply constant lockups upon first booting. It would then become progressively more and more stable over the course of several hours, until reaching a 100% stable state after about 3-4 hours.

I tested it with several different configurations and tested every component besides the motherboard, and everything except for the MB checked out fine. Finally I replaced the MB and not a single lockup ever since.