ABit's KA7-100 motherboard unstable????

[Guest]

Folks,

I have spent about 60 hours trying to get a clean install on this
motherboard. Because I anticipate problems and have 9 machines on my
LAN, I thought I'd buy two of these motherboards. I also bought two
Athlon 750 thunderbird CPUs and 5 Maxtor 20 gig ATA-100 7200 rpm 2 meg
buffer hard drives.

To make a very tiresome and long story short, I have tried just about
every way to configure NT with Service Pack 6a, Office 2000 SR-1,
Option pack 4, Winproxy 3.0o, Black Ice, Norton Anti-Virus, Acrobat
Reader 4.0, WinZip 8.0 and Fat32. To date, I have yet to complete this
task on either motherboard with either CPU using any combination of 5
disks without having signficant disk errors.

I get three errors while attempting to make an image copy using Power
Quest Disk Image 2.01. They are as follows:

1. Bad restart error
2. Bad cluster size
3. Upcase error

Some other symptoms is that my IIS console stops working and says that
there is bad data, and my web pages stop working. STRANGE.

I don't always get disk error #3 right away. Anyway, I've ruled out
memory errors by having extra around. I buy only Micron ECC memory.

I ruled out bad disks, as I have 5 of them from 3 different sources.

Now, I suppose the motherboard(s), (perhaps all of them in existance!)
is the only real culprit. I do have the KA7 motherboard without the
dreaded ata-100 support. I had no problems getting it up and running
with yet another Athlon 750.

I've tried to image with Norton Ghost 5.1--NO DEAL. It claims, much
like PQDI that the volume has errors and refuses to continue. I AM ABLE
to image after applying the basic NT install with IIS, Service Pack 3
and NT Reskit Release 2. Subsequent installs, no matter what order
causes problems--eventually. And YES, I downloaded and applied the
latest BIOS updates, and YES, I did use the ABIT service pack--SAME
EXACT PROBLEMS.

Has ANYONE else had this problem? I have tried to contact ABIT on
numerous occasions and have been put on hold for at least an hour once
and have had to ALWAYS give up waiting. I left a voice message for them
and an email over a week ago and have yet to hear anything. MY GUESS
IS THAT I'M NOT ALONE!!!!

At this point, I'd be happy if I could just exchange these motherboards
for the KA7--I think ABIT should pay for the shipping and handling.
Think I can get that done before X-MAS????

Please share your experiences. I have to believe this can't possibly be
a fluke.

Thanks,

Jerry

 

[Guest]

I've had problems wit an Abit board before and emailed technical support in the UK.
I didn't get a response until I mentioned in my second email that I had cc'd it to Toms Hardware Guide.
It was an issue with the original KA7 mobo power supply not working with GeForce graphics cards (board locking up on boot).
They gave me a returns number and offered to modify the mobo accordingly to allow it to work.
Try mailing them again and stating that you have sent your info to THG. Make sure you make it plain that you know what you are doing.

Ikon! (not the software people)

 

[Guest]

Folks,

I finally figured out how to resolve the stability issue with NT on this motherboard. It turns out that the imaging software I used needed some patches and I had to VERY carefully reapply Service Pack 6 after adding point to point tunneling protocol and Winproxy. One install out of order and it was Blue Screen of Death everytime.

So, Abit's Motherboard IS stable after all.....and I'm happy I did not give up and return it to Abit. This install of NT is, in fact, the most stable I have ever seen. Of course that WAS my objective.

Rather than providing all the details of the "fix", all I can recommend is that you take an image copy after every install that requires a reboot only after you are able to verify that you can gracefully shutdown the computer. This was a very slow and painful process, but it worked very effectively and I was able to fall back to a "stable" image after each mistake. After 12 images I was able to fully install SP6, Visual Studio 6.0, Crystal Report Writer, BackOffice 4.5 and Site Server Commerce Edition on an expanded 7.8 gig NTFS partition.

Some things to look out for:
1. Make sure you can create a stable image after installing SP4, Option Pack 4 or IE 4.01 SP1. If not, see if patches exist for your imaging software. They do exist for Drive Image and Norton Ghost. Believe it or not, the actual errors I documented were their to be found on these vendor's web sites.

2. Be careful when installing network services that you reapply the latest Service Pack. Note that you are always asked to hit the NT Server 4.0 CD everytime you install a network service for the first time. Chances are that Service Pack 6 has fixes to known bugs that you are introducing by installing that new network service.

3. Watch out for conflicts between proxy server/firewall software and the network services you have installed. I had to apply the latest upgrade to WinProxy.

Now, my mission is to go for bonus points:
I installed the Promise ATA-100 IDE RAID card only to find out that Partition Magic 4.01 and 6.0 rescue disks would "hang" after I defined a striped array using the Promise BIOS screen. I verified that this happened on ALL of my other motherboards made by SOYO and EPOX. It just so happens that I own former Promise IDE RAID cards (the FASTTACK and FASTRACK-66) series. These cards produced the same problem. So, this one is a PowerQuest issue. I did not find their FAQ's to be terribly helpful. I have written them. I was able to use Norton Ghost 2001 to move my image from a single disk on the motherboard's IDE-0 channel to the striped set. I then unplugged the hard drive on the ATA-66 channel and was up and running. I still would like my Partition Magic software to work so that I don't have to keep reconfiguring hard drives and swapping image files to get the results I want. If you have a fix to THIS problem, let me know. I was able to sort of fix this by installing Windows ME and using the boot.ini to alternatively boot into ME to use Partition Magic there. I don't like that solution, and I don't want Windows ME on my NT server Machine, and it's not the complete fix I need. Any other ideas?

Thanks

 

[Guest]

Hi,

i have an abit KT7 RAID mobo and i have RAID 0 with two IBM 7200rpm U100 30Gb discs. I wanted to make an image file of the clean windows install, and i noticed that my image file was only half the size it should be. (I made an image file of the same data on another PC and that image file was twice as big.)
I haven´t tried it yet, but i think that these backup programs do not support RAID and only backup one of the disks, so you only have half the data!
I used Ghost 5.0. I haven´t tried to restore from this file yet, because it took me hours to get this all to work properly.

If you find any backup program that does support RAID, please let me know...

 

[Grizely1]

Well I bought a KA7-100, and an Athlon 900 and i tell you I wish i hadn't.

 

[Guest]

I know that Norton Ghost versions 5.1c and above do support the Promise IDE RAID PCI cards. I haven't tried the on board RAID for the KA7-100. I'm really not sure how to enable RAID on this board, but I believe it is possible. If you can tell me how I'll investigate it.