Did my new eSATA box fry my A8N32-SLI mobo?

[ClickMe]

Just got a 4 bay / 1 eSATA cable / Port Multiplier capable SATA drive enclosure. I have an ASUS A8N32-SLI mobo / AMD dual-core X2-4800+ CPU / XP Pro SP2 system. I had always used ASUS's AiBooster just to only monitor CPU speed/utilization and bus speed. It always showed around 2.4GHz per Core and 200MHz bus.

I took a new Seagate 7200.10 320GB drive in the top bay of the enclosure and it showed up fine, unformatted, in Disk Management. I formatted it and copied two 5GB files to it and they verified perfectly to the byte. Did not notice anything in AiBooster, but I may not have been looking being so happy. I removed that drive tray from top bay and put new tray with a new unformatted 7200.10 320GB Seagate. That drive did NOT show up at all in Disk Management. That's when I noticed all hell breaking loose in AiBooster.

AiBooster intermitent CPU speeds of 5.2GHz and even 8GHz per core. The bus showed 400MHz and even 600MHz speeds. The two increments were not always correlated. They increases seemed more likely associated with start of bigger apps, but again not a one for one relationship. I powered down the eSATA box and tried again but got same bad results.

Next I searched for another system speed monitor and discovered something called CPU-Z. I installed it and ran it concurrently with AiBooster. CPU-Z showed fairly stable 2.4GHz / 200 MHz speeds while AiBooster was intermitently fluctuating. I want to know which of the two speed checkers I should believe?

If CPU-Z is right then why is AiBooster now different and why can't I see the 2nd hard drive? BTW if I put the 1st drive back I can see it. If AiBooster is right then is my mobo fried?

Looking for any helpfull advice.

 

[sailer]

I have the same type mobo and I have never managed to get the AIBooster to work correctly. I finally decided to uninstall it. CPU-Z shows what's happening very well and is a standard for monitoring a computer. I'd trust it any day over AIBooster.

When you changed the Seagate hardrive around so much, you may have confused the OS. You formatted a new hardrive, then stuck an unformatted drive in, leaving the system looking for the formatted drive. You might try sticking the formatted drive in and then add the second Seagate drive and see if you can format it at that time. You may have to reinstall Windows when you do all this.

Your motherboard probably isn't fried, just confused. Try using it as you did before you made the changes. If it works ok, then good.

 

[ClickMe]

Sailer

Thanks so much for your speedy reply.

I think your dead on right. Another poster in some other forum pointed out my X2-4800+ could not physically reach 5.2GHz nor 8GHz speed so AiBooster is probably messed up by something that happened with the eSATA box. You were also right about the second hard drive. I put the first drive back in it's original bay and added the second unformatted drive into the second bay. Now both drives show up and I could format and use the second drive too.


Now I just have to learn how to hot swap and move these drives around in the box with Windows.

Thanks again.