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#1
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P4P800 BIOS Disaster!!!! Suggestions PLS!!!
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. |
#2
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"Ken Fox" wrote in message
... [...] 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. Did you load the Default Settings in BIOS then save them? Tony. -- 3GHz P4 (HT enabled) Asus P4C800-E Deluxe PDC20378 IDE/SATA controller ADI AD1985 audio MSI FX5900U-VTD256 (BIOS 4.35.20.22.0) 2x 512MB Kingston PC3500 2x 36.7 SATA WD Raptors 52/32/52 LiteOn CD-Writer 16x Pioneer DVD-120S Enermax 550W PSU Windows XP Pro & Linux Fedora PC-70 Lian Li case w/ side window Hitachi 174SXW B 17" LCD To email me, replace org.nz with net.nz |
#3
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On Wed, 7 Jan 2004 23:16:36 -0700, "Ken Fox"
wrote: 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 |
#4
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"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 |
#5
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Hi,
Ok, I tried booting into safe mode. It took a really really really long time -- longer than I recall on other machines, however I don't recall doing that before on this one, and the boot up on this machine, with the Via RAID enabled, has never been fast. Safe mode is weird in the best of circumstances so it is hard to know whether what I observed was normal. As to the disk access problem, it was definitely much improved over regular mode. There was some delay each time I changed from one drive to another drive, but subsequent accesses on the same drive were relatively normal. Going back into regular mode, now, the problem has recurred. Let me be a bit more specific about the problem. It seems as though I can "explode" the directory/file tree in Windows Explorer (Windows 2000) normally most of the time. The problem is when I right click to open a dialog box on a file or directory, and sometimes, when I double click on a file to open it or start a program. The system will wait a ridiculous amount of time, maybe 20 seconds or more, sometimes, before the dialog box comes up; occasionally windows explorer or the other process crashes while it is waiting. It is as if Windows Explorer has no trouble giving a list of files and directories in a drive, but if I want to open them or copy them or whatever, the system then has difficulty locating the specific file in order to act upon it. Use of the internet and email appears to be normal. A few programs do not work most of the time in either safe mode or regular mode -- an example is the free Microsoft Photo editor program which is my default program when I click on a jpg. Other programs work completely normally, like Nero and Nero Express; I've burned a CDR with no problems this morning. I have confirmed that 1012 is the currently loaded Bios, so the reflashes apparently worked although perhaps the CMOS is stuck in some way I don't understand. Once again, the system was working fine, no problems at all, until a few hours after I flashed the new bios 1014 onto the box. Sometimes the problems seem to go away, like this morning after the machine sat all night downloading a file. Right now, after these various maneuvers (safe mode x2, loading bios defaults) the problems are back. At first I thought maybe the new SATA drive was the culprit but last night I switched back to the old ide drive and disconnected the SATA drive and there was no difference. I don't really know what else to do except trying to remove the cmos battery and short the jumpers but I'm not really sure at all whether that is worth doing or will accomplish anything. Suggestions, advice, personal counselling :-) are all welcome. TIA. Ken |
#6
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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 ------------- "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 |
#7
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On Thu, 8 Jan 2004 09:35:53 -0700, "Ken Fox"
wrote: Hi, Ok, I tried booting into safe mode. It took a really really really long time -- longer than I recall on other machines, however I don't recall doing that before on this one, and the boot up on this machine, with the Via RAID enabled, has never been fast. Safe mode is weird in the best of circumstances so it is hard to know whether what I observed was normal. As to the disk access problem, it was definitely much improved over regular mode. There was some delay each time I changed from one drive to another drive, but subsequent accesses on the same drive were relatively normal. Going back into regular mode, now, the problem has recurred. Let me be a bit more specific about the problem. It seems as though I can "explode" the directory/file tree in Windows Explorer (Windows 2000) normally most of the time. The problem is when I right click to open a dialog box on a file or directory, and sometimes, when I double click on a file to open it or start a program. The system will wait a ridiculous amount of time, maybe 20 seconds or more, sometimes, before the dialog box comes up; occasionally windows explorer or the other process crashes while it is waiting. It is as if Windows Explorer has no trouble giving a list of files and directories in a drive, but if I want to open them or copy them or whatever, the system then has difficulty locating the specific file in order to act upon it. Use of the internet and email appears to be normal. A few programs do not work most of the time in either safe mode or regular mode -- an example is the free Microsoft Photo editor program which is my default program when I click on a jpg. Other programs work completely normally, like Nero and Nero Express; I've burned a CDR with no problems this morning. I have confirmed that 1012 is the currently loaded Bios, so the reflashes apparently worked although perhaps the CMOS is stuck in some way I don't understand. Once again, the system was working fine, no problems at all, until a few hours after I flashed the new bios 1014 onto the box. Sometimes the problems seem to go away, like this morning after the machine sat all night downloading a file. Right now, after these various maneuvers (safe mode x2, loading bios defaults) the problems are back. At first I thought maybe the new SATA drive was the culprit but last night I switched back to the old ide drive and disconnected the SATA drive and there was no difference. I don't really know what else to do except trying to remove the cmos battery and short the jumpers but I'm not really sure at all whether that is worth doing or will accomplish anything. Suggestions, advice, personal counselling :-) are all welcome. TIA. Ken Do you use another program as an alternative to Windows Explorer such as Power Desk? Do you use a firewall program like Zone Alarm? Try having it "stop all internet activity". My PC also recently experienced a severe delay browsing my HD partitions, etc. I found that Power Desk, my Windows Explorer alternative, was trying to communicate over the internet. Once I reconfigured Zone Alarm to stop Power Desk from accessing the internet my slowdowns disappeared. ---Alex |
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"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, What I find strange is that you had the same delays in opening files even after going back to the original 120GB EIDE drive and BIOS. Assuming at that time you detached the USB drive and the 160GB SATA, was the jumper setting on the 120GB EIDE drive and its position on along the IDE cable the same as before? I can't think what else the cause might be. Tony. -- 3GHz P4 (HT enabled) Asus P4C800-E Deluxe PDC20378 IDE/SATA controller ADI AD1985 audio MSI FX5900U-VTD256 (BIOS 4.35.20.22.0) 2x 512MB Kingston PC3500 2x 36.7 SATA WD Raptors 52/32/52 LiteOn CD-Writer 16x Pioneer DVD-120S Enermax 550W PSU Windows XP Pro & Linux Fedora PC-70 Lian Li case w/ side window Hitachi 174SXW B 17" LCD To email me, replace org.nz with net.nz |
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"Alex" wrote in message
... On Thu, 8 Jan 2004 09:35:53 -0700, "Ken Fox" wrote: Hi, Ok, I tried booting into safe mode. It took a really really really long time -- longer than I recall on other machines, however I don't recall doing that before on this one, and the boot up on this machine, with the Via RAID enabled, has never been fast. Safe mode is weird in the best of circumstances so it is hard to know whether what I observed was normal. As to the disk access problem, it was definitely much improved over regular mode. There was some delay each time I changed from one drive to another drive, but subsequent accesses on the same drive were relatively normal. Going back into regular mode, now, the problem has recurred. Let me be a bit more specific about the problem. It seems as though I can "explode" the directory/file tree in Windows Explorer (Windows 2000) normally most of the time. The problem is when I right click to open a dialog box on a file or directory, and sometimes, when I double click on a file to open it or start a program. The system will wait a ridiculous amount of time, maybe 20 seconds or more, sometimes, before the dialog box comes up; occasionally windows explorer or the other process crashes while it is waiting. It is as if Windows Explorer has no trouble giving a list of files and directories in a drive, but if I want to open them or copy them or whatever, the system then has difficulty locating the specific file in order to act upon it. Use of the internet and email appears to be normal. A few programs do not work most of the time in either safe mode or regular mode -- an example is the free Microsoft Photo editor program which is my default program when I click on a jpg. Other programs work completely normally, like Nero and Nero Express; I've burned a CDR with no problems this morning. I have confirmed that 1012 is the currently loaded Bios, so the reflashes apparently worked although perhaps the CMOS is stuck in some way I don't understand. Once again, the system was working fine, no problems at all, until a few hours after I flashed the new bios 1014 onto the box. Sometimes the problems seem to go away, like this morning after the machine sat all night downloading a file. Right now, after these various maneuvers (safe mode x2, loading bios defaults) the problems are back. At first I thought maybe the new SATA drive was the culprit but last night I switched back to the old ide drive and disconnected the SATA drive and there was no difference. I don't really know what else to do except trying to remove the cmos battery and short the jumpers but I'm not really sure at all whether that is worth doing or will accomplish anything. Suggestions, advice, personal counselling :-) are all welcome. TIA. Ken Do you use another program as an alternative to Windows Explorer such as Power Desk? Do you use a firewall program like Zone Alarm? Try having it "stop all internet activity". My PC also recently experienced a severe delay browsing my HD partitions, etc. I found that Power Desk, my Windows Explorer alternative, was trying to communicate over the internet. Once I reconfigured Zone Alarm to stop Power Desk from accessing the internet my slowdowns disappeared. ---Alex Hi Alex, My firewall is strictly hardware based, in my NAT router. I had problems previously with a zone alarm install (on an earlier system) and I've avoided SW firewall programs ever since. I don't have any other browsers loaded nor any other mail/news programs loaded other than the MS OE and IE programs. When I have task manager open but in a small window on the desktop while trying to use windows explorer, the major process is "windows idle process," and CPU useage is like 2%, maybe 7% max while the program is trying to find the files. Thanks, ken |
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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 |
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