Ive used the backup bios feature. Have had no prob booting off either main or backup bios. Main bios is f5 backup bios is f6e.I used in bios flashing utility to flash main bios to f6e. Ive got 2x seagate 160 gig sata drives in raid 0. Been great here. Havnt tried ide raid. Stable board here.

Ken

Ken


"Mark Taylor" wrote in message ...
Hello to all

Thought I might share my very unpleasant experience with thso looking at this board as it might help you to avoid the many long hours of frustration I had with this mobo. My main reasons for buying this board was to use the onboard ITE IDE RAID and the dual bios function. Both do not work properly so I will probably scrap thsi baord and buy something else, possibly the Aopen A4C Max.

I have just spent a week setting up this board with an existing Promise RAID 0+1 from my old system onto this board. Lets say along the way trying to get the system to work I managed to screw up the first board and I am now onto the second board. This was mainly to try and get the blue screen stop errors on the ntfs.sys to stop occurring. The onboard ITE IDE RAID controller in my opinion is a dud. I mainly bought this board as I had 4 WD 80GB 8MB 7200 drives for my previous RAID which are IDE and wanted to keep using them. This was one of the few boards that had a RAID 0+1 IDE controller. I now regret buying this board and I am seriously thinking of changing to something else. I am now using it with my original Promise PCI Fasttrak TX2 RAID controller with version 33 bios and 34 driver under Windows XP Pro which so far is quite stable. I have many years experience with PC's and must say I think this board needs some serious BIOS work and driver upgrades if it is going to be useful. The Dual Bios managed to fail, again one of the main reasons for buying this board. The old version had a jumper on the board so you could force it to use the backup BIOS but this one uses software after the pre-BIOS boot. The BIOS EPROM's are also surface mounted so cannot be removed for easy reflashing via an external provider so the board became unbootable after I flashed to version f6e which was mentioned here and thought might fix some of the instability problems. The BIOS failed at the prepost so I could not get into the BIOS to use the software to boot from the good backup or take the chips out and swap them so basically the board was screwed. Whoever thought that idea up certainly did not take all the possibilites into account. I noticed the Aopen A4C Max has two socketed BIOS chips with a jumper on the board to force the system to boot from the backup.

Regards
Mark