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KT7A and ATA/100

Forum Motherboards & Memory : General Motherboard - KT7A and ATA/100

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keithejohnson   06-24-2002 at 04:02:15 PM

Hello,
I just purchased and received a new Maxtor D540 120Gig drive to install into my system. I have a system that I have built myself. It contains an ABit KT7-A motherboard with an AMD Athlon 1.4Ghz processor. I have 512MB RAM, an ATI Rage Fury video card, a Soundblaster Live Platinum sound card, a Plextor CD-RW drive, a 56k modem, and NIC card, and a 300w power supply. I also have a 30Gig Western Digital hard drive. I did have a smaller second drive installed that I removed to install the Maxtor drive.

I changed the Maxtor drive to run in slave mode and connected it to the same controller and power leads that the previous drive was connected to. I am running Win 2k Pro. When I boot the pc, it recognizes each of the drives and then takes me to the Win2k sign on screen. I enter my user name and password and windows begins to load. After loading the desktop and during the first few seconds of running, the system simply reboots. I have tried this in slave mode and in cable select mode with the same result. One thing I notice is that my current drive is ATA-66 and the new one is ATA-100. Is there any issue with mixing these two? I was also wondering if it may be a power issue and disconnected my CD-RW drive and got the same result. Like I said, I had another drive running fine so I'm not sure what the problem could be. Update MoBo BIOS/Drivers Maybe?

Please let me know if you have some suggestions.

Thanks,
Keith Johnson

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garedelyon   06-24-2002 at 05:00:23 PM
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Maybe you should look at your power supply? Your new hdd may be loading it too much. I too have a kt7a, version 1.3, and I *HAD* a 300w rated power supply. It was cheap - the case + psu cost 25 British pounds, and I had a 950 MHz Duron, 2 hdds, cdwriter, cdrom, sound card, network card, ATI Radeon 64 Mb video card. Everything worked fine for 6 months, then 2 weeks ago I fitted an Athlon 1800 XP, result was just like yours, Windows XP would get to the desktop, and then the PC would power down. Also I found disk corruption afterwards... I noticed the shutdown always happened when the 2nd cdrom spun up to speed, so I disconnected that drive, ide cable and power, then I got a good boot & I could run Windows XP, but if I used cooling software like Vcool or cpuidle, I got shutdowns, my (complete) solution was a new 350W Athlon-certified power supply. Cost another 25 pounds. Your problem may have a different cause, but maybe you could reduce the power load & see if it changes the problem.... It's not just the watts rating that matters, cheap power supplies perform badly when they are at the top of their power rating and become unstable, I have been told.

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garedelyon   06-24-2002 at 05:03:41 PM
- 0 +

Sorry I read your post again & I see that you already disconnected a cd drive, it still could be a power issue though.

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keithejohnson   06-27-2002 at 03:50:17 PM
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For anyone else who runs across this, here is what I did.

I disconnected the existing Primary Master drive and connected the new, unformatted drive as the Primary Master, leaving the other disconnected. I booted from the Win 2k CD and formatted and installed Win 2k on the new drive. Upon completion of this, I then reconnected the original Primary Master drive, changed the new drive to be Primary Slave and rebooted. The system now booted fine, so I reformatted the new drive and it all worked fine.

Not quite Plug-n-Play but, all in all, pretty simple.

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