Corrupt Win2K on KT7-RAID

[Guest]

This is a strange problem. I'll start with the specs:

ABIT KT7-RAID
BIOS: UL (with HPT370 v1.0.3 embedded)
Duron 650 @ 1.65v
128MB Infineon PC133
2x Western Digital WD205BA (20.5GB, ATA66, 7200rpm)
^-(Each drive alone on one of the HPT370's channels)
Creative 4x2x24 CDRW (alone on IDE1)
EPO 10x DVD (alone on IDE2)
WinFast GeForce2 MX
SB Live! Value
Samsung SC1200-TX 10/100 NIC

(All BIOS adjustments to most conservative settings.)

I start with a clean system, setting up RAID 0 (16K block size) with the two Western Digital drives. I go through the disk setup for Win2k, being sure to press F6 to install the HighPoint drivers (making sure they're v1.0.3 to match the BIOS) and set up one 6GB partition (boot) and one 34GB (storage), both NTFS. The install completes normally and I set up my DSL and grab SP1 and the VIA 4-in-1. Everything seems peachy as I set up all other drivers, rebooting often in between.

The problem comes when I actually power off the machine. Invariably, when I try to start it the next time some system files come up corrupted, usually resulting in a blue screen STOP error during Win2k boot. Everything is great until then. I can warm boot (via Start Menu) as much as I want, but as soon as I shut down completely, the install's toast.

My guess is that it has something to do with the cache not flushing completely/correctly from the HPT370 or the hard drives themselves. The shutdown procedure seems awful quick, and I'm wondering if perhaps windows thinks all disk activity is done before it actually is, pulling power from the drives in mid-write.

I've heard of problems with Win2K and ACPI on the KT7 and have used modbin6.exe to allow control of ACPI in my BIOS (this was done AFTER experiencing the above problem many times), but I have yet to disable it. Could this be ACPI related? What would I lose by not using ACPI? If I do disable it, should I enable APM instead, or leave them both off? I was of the understanding that they are redundant (ACPI being a more advanced version of APM?).

Thanks in advance for any help you can offer!

 

[Guest]

I tried disabling ACPI in the KT7-RAID's BIOS (thanks to modbin6.exe) and reinstalled Windows 2K. I pressed F7 for good measure at the beginning when it says "Press F6 if you need to install third party SCSI or mass storage devices" (and F6 too, since I needed to install the HPT370 driver) which I heard is supposed to suppress ACPI installation even if it is enabled.

The result?

My computer has healed! No longer allergic to Windows 2000, I can shut down and restart without file corruption! I decided to enable APM since I didn't like to have to shut down manually, but it seems to behave itself (unlike ACPI) and not jump the gun turning off the drives before they've finished writing. I don't get all the fancy-shmancy power features, but that doesn't really matter to me anyway. APM is good enough.

So, after several weeks of headaches and wondering if I had bad hardware, I've learned:

KT7-RAID + Win2K + ACPI = BAD!

KT7-RAID + Win2K + APM = GOOD!

PS- I'd love to point people to modbin6.exe (Award v6.00 BIOS .BIN file editor), but I can't for the life of me find where I stumbled across it. If anyone wants it, feel free to email me and I'll send it in an attachment. Wonderful little utility. I found some other disabled options besides control of ACPI in my BIOS that I could enable too (Gate A20 speed, RX/TX polarity for the IR ports, display of the SDRAM operating voltage in the BIOS hardware monitor, etc).