A7V600 SATA Problem ?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Christian Hanrahan
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Christian Hanrahan

Back in early Feb of 04, I built a system for my sister in law as
follows:

Asus A7V600 Motherboard

Athlon XP 2800/333 (2.08 GHz)

Corsair XMS Extreme Memory Speed Series, Low Latency (Twin Pack) 184
Pin 512MB(256MBx2) DDR PC-2700 with Platinum-Silver Heat Spreader

ASUS V9520TD GeforceFX5200 128M

1 80 GB Maxtor SATA Drive, model 6Y080M0

DVD+RW PLEXTOR PX-504A-SW IDE RET

Sony 1.44 MB Floppy drive

Antec Lanboy case w/350W Power Supply

I built the machine with Windows XP Professional service pack 1a and
had no problems. The machine worked for about a month before problems
began. The first problem was that XP refused to boot pased the inital
splash screen. After some troubleshooting, I realized that the
operating system was unable to detect the hard drive. I tried
reinstalling XP Pro, and discovered that it took 20 minutes to detect
and check the hard drive. Guessing that the hard drive was going bad,
I downloaded the Maxtor PowerMax diag tool from the Maxtor website,
only to find that it does not support SATA RAID controllers on the
NVidia chipsets. I called Maxtor anyway, and got them to send me out
a replacement drive. I rebuilt the machine (again, having no
problems) and returned it to her.

Two weeks later, it is dead again. This time, however XP can see the
drive, it just won't boot from it. I was able to get it to boot into
safe mode, but could never get it to boot into normal mode without
hanging at the boot screen.

I thought that the onboard NIC may be causing problems since its
driver is not loaded in safe mode, and the machine would hang if
booted in Safe Mode with Networking. I tried disabling the NIC in the
BIOS and in the OS, but could not get the machine to boot. After a
few tries, it refused to boot in any mode, safe mode or normal mode.

I then rebuilt the machine again, using Windows 2000 Professional,
service pack 4. After the OS installation, the machine blue-screened
claiming that the software key of the registry was corrupt. I rebuilt
the machine again, using Win2k. This time the machine ran for about
two weeks, before blue screening again, same error--software key of
the registry is corrupt.

I tried updating the motherboard BIOS to 1006, and tried updating the
drivers for the SATA RAID, but to no avail.

I've been building PCs for 10 years and have been using ASUS
motherboards for much of that time. I've never had problems such as
these. I don't know whether the problem is another bad drive, or a
motherboard incompatibility or something else. I cannot run the
PowerMax diags on the drive because I don't have another machine with
a supported SATA controller.

Has anyone experienced problems like this before with this board, or
does anyone have any suggestions or what I might try next to fix this
problem ?

Thanks,
 
Back in early Feb of 04, I built a system for my sister in law as
follows:

Asus A7V600 Motherboard

Athlon XP 2800/333 (2.08 GHz)

Corsair XMS Extreme Memory Speed Series, Low Latency (Twin Pack) 184
Pin 512MB(256MBx2) DDR PC-2700 with Platinum-Silver Heat Spreader

ASUS V9520TD GeforceFX5200 128M

1 80 GB Maxtor SATA Drive, model 6Y080M0

DVD+RW PLEXTOR PX-504A-SW IDE RET

Sony 1.44 MB Floppy drive

Antec Lanboy case w/350W Power Supply

I built the machine with Windows XP Professional service pack 1a and
had no problems. The machine worked for about a month before problems
began. The first problem was that XP refused to boot pased the inital
splash screen. After some troubleshooting, I realized that the
operating system was unable to detect the hard drive. I tried
reinstalling XP Pro, and discovered that it took 20 minutes to detect
and check the hard drive. Guessing that the hard drive was going bad,
I downloaded the Maxtor PowerMax diag tool from the Maxtor website,
only to find that it does not support SATA RAID controllers on the
NVidia chipsets. I called Maxtor anyway, and got them to send me out
a replacement drive. I rebuilt the machine (again, having no
problems) and returned it to her.

Two weeks later, it is dead again. This time, however XP can see the
drive, it just won't boot from it. I was able to get it to boot into
safe mode, but could never get it to boot into normal mode without
hanging at the boot screen.

I thought that the onboard NIC may be causing problems since its
driver is not loaded in safe mode, and the machine would hang if
booted in Safe Mode with Networking. I tried disabling the NIC in the
BIOS and in the OS, but could not get the machine to boot. After a
few tries, it refused to boot in any mode, safe mode or normal mode.

I then rebuilt the machine again, using Windows 2000 Professional,
service pack 4. After the OS installation, the machine blue-screened
claiming that the software key of the registry was corrupt. I rebuilt
the machine again, using Win2k. This time the machine ran for about
two weeks, before blue screening again, same error--software key of
the registry is corrupt.

I tried updating the motherboard BIOS to 1006, and tried updating the
drivers for the SATA RAID, but to no avail.

I've been building PCs for 10 years and have been using ASUS
motherboards for much of that time. I've never had problems such as
these. I don't know whether the problem is another bad drive, or a
motherboard incompatibility or something else. I cannot run the
PowerMax diags on the drive because I don't have another machine with
a supported SATA controller.

Has anyone experienced problems like this before with this board, or
does anyone have any suggestions or what I might try next to fix this
problem ?

Thanks,
Click to expand...

Have you run memtest86 from memtest.org or memtest86.com ?
Registry corruption can be caused by memory problems.
Don't install an OS, until the memory tests error free.

HTH,
Paul
 
I ran
I've had memtest86 running for 22 hours, and it hasn't found any
errors yet. The Corsair RAM that I'm using isn't on the recommended
list for this board, according to the asus website. However, I'm
using 333 MHz RAM (PC2700) and the only type listed on the Asus
website for this board is the 400 MHz RAM. Does this matter ? Is
there anything else that I can test ?

Thanks
 
I ran
I've had memtest86 running for 22 hours, and it hasn't found any
errors yet. The Corsair RAM that I'm using isn't on the recommended
list for this board, according to the asus website. However, I'm
using 333 MHz RAM (PC2700) and the only type listed on the Asus
website for this board is the 400 MHz RAM. Does this matter ? Is
there anything else that I can test ?

Thanks
Click to expand...

Looking in the downloadable BIOS, these are the RAID BIOS versions
inserted in the Asus BIOS file. I find these with my hex editor and
a copy of each BIOS:

1007.004 6420R231.rom (Beta BIOS)
1006 6420R201.ROM
1005 6420R120.ROM
1004 6420R120.ROM
1003 6420R120.ROM

VIARAID220d.zip (on Asus download page)

ftp://downloads.viaarena.com/drivers/RAID/
ftp://downloads.viaarena.com/drivers/RAID/VIA_VT6420VT8237_SerialATA_V220E.zip
(The V220E has a copy of the R231 ROM in it, so the Asus Beta BIOS
has the most recent version and no hacking is required to get it.)

I was hoping to find some "release notes", because sometimes they
admit to errata or problems with hardware or software. In the RAID/
directory above, are two release notes, but no recent ones.

So, you could flash up to the latest beta BIOS, and then either use
the Asus 220d or the Via 220e driver package.

A second thought I had, is perhaps the problem is one of shutdown
delay. On various kinds of computers, there have been problems in
the past, where a computer will shutdown before the disk cache is
flushed out to the physical media. Failure to flush, results in the
last file written, to be corrupted. One crude fix for this, is to
disable all cacheing on the disk, so there is never an exposure to
shutdown time. A second fix, is to find a Microsoft patch that
increases the time between shutting down a disk subsystem and
shutting off the computer. You might investigate Google or the
MS KB, for potential leads in that direction. For example, I
think there is an option in current MS OS, to mark a disk as
"removable", and the caches are disabled in that path, so there
are no caches to catch in an unclean state.

Since I don't see any evidence in Google, for a SATA cable
or data transmission problem, I'm not even going to go there :-)

(Regarding the RAM, on an Athlon, it is best to select a memory
speed which matches the FSB of the processor. If your processor
is FSB333, your ram is DDR333, and you aren't overclocking, then
that is the optimal configuration. If you had a FSB333 processor,
DDR400 ram, and were overclocking to FSB400, then again, as long
as the RAM and FSB are at the same speed, that is optimal.)

HTH,
Paul
 
I interrupted the memory test (after 36 hours of testing, no errors
were found) and rebuilt the machine using Win2k Pro and the ViaRAID
220d driver that you suggested. So far, so good, but it ran for a
couple of weeks last time. I'm doing plenty of rebooting to try and
uncover any further problems.

Thanks for your help.

Chris
 
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