Hi Max,


"Maximus" wrote in message
...
Alternatively, you can use one hard disk and install a fresh W2K on it to
see if
all is fine. Remember to apply all 4 Service packs.


Max
-------------

While I could do that, I don't see the point, since the original drive that
was removed before I put in the SATA drive and before there were any
problems had the same difficulties.

Also, I've taken fairly recent ghost images that worked fine from a few
weeks ago and put them on both drives and the same problems occur. These
ghost images have been used before and worked fine in the past, and were
also run through the Norton Ghost, ghost file verification process.

The problem is definitely hardware based as far as I can tell, but it sure
is elusive. I'm about to try the CMOS jumper trick and if it doesn't work
maybe buy a Dell and say the hell with it!! Life is too short.

Thanks,

ken

"Ken Fox" wrote in message
...
"Alex" wrote in message
...
On Wed, 7 Jan 2004 23:16:36 -0700, "Ken Fox"
wrote:


Hi Alex and Tony,

(and everyone else -- the problem persists!),

I left the machine on last night as I was downloading a large file and
that
was working. When I came back this morning the machine seemed to
function
normally, e.g. no delays for disk accesses. Although the bios was
basically
set for bios defaults anyway, I rebooted and went into the bios setting
bios
defaults. Since I'm not booting to one of the primary or secondary ide
devices (I've gone back to booting from the SATA drive since the primary
IDE
drive boots had the same problem), I had to correct the boot order after
it
rebooted and defaults led the bios to an unbootable drive. After
booting
back up the problems recurred, e.g. the machine has great difficulty
locating drives, all drives, be they floppy, CD, hard, whatever. When
going
into Windows Explorer, it either takes 20 seconds to get the drop down
dialog window or the program (windows explorer) crashes altogether
sometimes. Occasionally the disk accesses work normally and quickly.

I will reboot into safe mode and see if the problems go away; if they
do,
Alex, what is the next step? Reloading NIC drivers, assuming the NIC
portion of the board is dead and needs an RMA, what should I do?

Thanks in advance for all responses. I'll try rebooting now into safe
mode
and see if it works. I would have tried that before posting this but I
can't tell if each reboot might end up being the last one for this box,
and
if it is I'll have to get my notebook up and running later today ----

rgds,

ken





Hi,

apologies for the length in advance

Yesterday I put a new 160GB SATA drive into my P4P800 Deluxe system,
using
it in 2 partitions to replace a 120GB EIDE drive. The idea was to
speed
up
performance by using the 150MHz drive instead of a drive that was
being
limited at 100MHz by the Intel controller chip, plus to get more
space.
~30GB are used for a Win2K system partition and the rest for video
files,
mostly tv programs from my Wintek DVR card.

I ghosted the contents of the old drive onto the new partition and
surprisingly it all worked, and W2K somehow managed to mend itself
even
though it was booting from a different hard disk given a different #
by
the
bios.

I ran Sandra testing and found that the drive was only running at
UDMA-5
(133MHz) speeds; the report recommended updating the bios if
possible,
among
other things. I reran the test on several different boots and got
the
same
results. So I went over to the Asus site and read the readme on the
newest
bios 1014 for this board and saw that one of the things supposidly
fixed
was
disk access speeds. I had seen some posts here reporting problems
with
this
bios but others seemed happy with it so I figured it was reversible
and
worth a shot.

I applied the bios using Asusupdate but with the bios on a diskette,
not
over the internet. All seemed well, however disk score did not
improve
in
Sandra despite numerous attempts to tinker with the bios settings. I
just
figured that this was a problem not worth dealing with and forgot it.
System performance was otherwise great.

Later today I received a new 120GB IDE drive from a rebate promotion
found
on a "deals" type internet site (basically 100 CDRs in a cakebox plus
the
WD
120GB drive for about $35 after rebates -- who could pass THAT
up????).
I
took this drive and put it into an external USB 2.0 enclosure, and
turned
it
on and connected it to a USB 2.0 port where it was immediately
recognized.
I proceeded to format this drive, which went fine, then about an hour
or
two
later I came back to it and copied some files from my in-box data and
pictures directories onto the new USB drive. After a couple of
directories
(I copied quite a few), it became obvious that it was taking way too
long,
like 20 seconds, for the dialog box to appear when I right clicked on
a
drive or directory. This got steadily worse. Whenever I clicked on
a
desktop icon it took, similarly, 20 or even 30+ seconds to get a
response.
This got old really fast!

At first I thought my new ATA drive was about to bite the dust or
that
there
was a problem with the W2K ghosted install or that the drive had
become
corrupted, so, being as I had ghosted the drive earlier today I ran
Norton
Ghost and put the image back on the boot partition. This went fine
but
there was no change in this problem. Then I figured, it must be the
drive,
so I took the previous drive and put it back in the box, disconnected
the
new SATA drive, and reinserted the old, unchanged drive in its former
position on the IDE chain, then rebooted. Problems continued, no
change.
Then, I took a ghosted copy of the IDE drive from a couple of weeks
ago
and
put that on the IDE drive -- no change, same problem. So by this
point
I
figured there was either some sort of hardware problem or bios
problem.

I flashed the bios with afudos.exe with bios 1012; no improvement.
Then,
taking a hint from an earlier post on this ng, I reflashed the bios
with
the
earliest bios I could find (the one on the CDROM that came with the
mobo,
using the afudos version from that cdrom), then I reflashed with
1012.

All of the bios flashes appeared to go without incident and no
problems
were
reported by afudos.

However, and this is a huge however, the system remains all screwed
up!!!!!!!!!!!!! Every time I try to get into the contents of a
drive,
I
get
this 30 or second delay, yet W2K control panel shows no problems and
the
bios shows no problem recognizing any of the devices.

SO: I am at wits end about what to do; nothing has worked. 1014
seemed
to
work ok for a while but then a few hours later after I had it format
a
new
USB drive, I got the afforementioned disk access problems and they
have
not
gone away in spite of multiple bios flashes. The bios does however
seem
to
work, it shows up and has the usual options on hitting "del" on
rebooting.

I should mention that I previously had another IDE drive in the same
external enclosure attached to the system, just that it was 80gb not
120gb,
so the system was "used" to having a USB drive attached to it.

I can't think of anything else to do. Maybe the best thing to do is
to
short the jumpers on the CMOS as I've read about here before, but
I've
never
done that and I'm not sure that is the right thing to do at this
juncture.
If you think it is, please give me failsafe instructions since I have
a
tendency to take situtations like this and turn them into dumpster
runs
for
a system :-)

Thanks for all suggestions and I apologize if this problem has been
addressed before; I just don't have the ability to use the system the
way
I
would like, and my notebook is having problems as well so I haven't
tried
using that as a spare.

rgds,

ken
p.s. I turned off all overclocking features when these problems first
occurred and they remain OFF.



Ken,

Consider the possibility that this may not be a BIOS or HD problem.

The delays may be NIC card related. See if they go away after booting
into safe mode with no network drivers.

Good Luck!

---Alex