Software reboot hangs on GA-7DPXDW+

I decided to give AMD a chance in the dual-processor server market and
upgrade our development server using the GA-7DPXDW+ board with two AMD
Athlon MP2800+ processors.

o The board and CPU installation went fine - good board, easy to set-up
o At boot-up, the BIOS reported "Unknown processor" albeit two of them
o Ignored this and went ahead to install MSDN Windows 2000 Server
o Installed fine (or so I thought) so carried on with video driver etc.
o Happened to check Task Manager and discovered that it wasn't dual
processor :-(

Wondered if this was because the BIOS wasn't recognising the MP2800+ CPUs so
wandered off to the Gigabyte web-site and found a more up to date BIOS (ver
F7) which supports the MP: 2800+

BTW: I assume the 7DPXDW+ board is the same or at least very similar to the
7DXPDW board (no +)? I can't find any reference to the + variety on the
Gigabyte web-site.

o Found a floppy disk (!!) and upgraded the BIOS (always hate doing that)
and on reboot, it recognised the processor correctly
o Re-installed Windows 2000 and at some point during the install the set-up
program crashed with memory dump
o Hit RESET and carried on the install and apart from a couple of errors
during set-up (couldn't load files), Win2K installed

Two processors are now reported so moving forward...

Except, when this PC tries to do a software reboot either from Alt-Ctrl-Del
or a program (e.g. driver install) requesting reboot, it hangs just after
reporting:

----cut here----
AMD 762 AGPSet BIOS for 7DXPWn F7
Check System Health Ok
----cut here----

Pressing RESET at this point (which I guess is a hardware reset) and it
reboots fine.

LATER: Discovered it's nothing to do with Windows 2000. Boot into MS-DOS and
hit Alt-Ctrl-Del and the same thing happens.

Any ideas?

Thanks, Rob.

LATER: Discovered it's nothing to do with Windows 2000. Boot into MS-DOS
and
hit Alt-Ctrl-Del and the same thing happens.

Some more observations:

When ALT-CTRL-DEL is pressed from MS-DOS, the HDD LED and LEDs on the front
of the CD-ROM light up immediately and then stay on. Sometimes the software
reboot gets a bit further in that it gets to the "Detecting IDE devices" but
then fails to find any devices.

Cheers, Rob.

of the CD-ROM light up immediately and then stay on. Sometimes the
software
reboot gets a bit further in that it gets to the "Detecting IDE devices"
but

Ahh think I've found the culprit. I've installed an PCI IDE RAID controller
in there as this was what the previous system used. The reason being need to
bring up the old RAID array to copy the data off the old hard disk drives.
I've disabled the on-board IDE RAID controller.

It appears to be this generic IDE RAID controller that's causing software
reboots to hang. I've taken it out for now and will continue with the
rebuild without it.

But the BIOS not recognising the MP2800+ was true and the BIOS upgrade was
needed.

Cheers, Rob

Rob Nicholson wrote:

(snip)

BTW: I assume the 7DPXDW+ board is the same or at least very similar to the
7DXPDW board (no +)? I can't find any reference to the + variety on the
Gigabyte web-site.

(snip snip)

I don't have hands-on experience on these boards but they are definitely
not the same. They might be similar features-wise but the PCBs are
significantly different.

This is the + board
http://www.giga-byte.com/Server/File...pxdwplus_b.jpg

This is the original board:
http://www.giga-byte.com/Server/File...dpxdw_01_b.jpg

This is the Gigabyte link for your + board:
http://www.giga-byte.com/Server/Prod...-7DPXDW-P.htm#

So if you've installed the BIOS for the original board, assuming they're
similar/identical, reflash the proper F5 BIOS (with 2800+ support) for
the + board and reinstall win2000 server accordingly.
http://www.giga-byte.com/Server/Supp...A-7DPXDW-P.htm

Regards
Nikos

This is the + board
http://www.giga-byte.com/Server/File...pxdwplus_b.jpg

Yes, this looks like our board -

This is the Gigabyte link for your + board:

http://www.giga-byte.com/Server/Prod...GA-7DPXDW-P.ht
m#

Thanks for the link - I hadn't made the logical leap that from + to P :-)

So if you've installed the BIOS for the original board, assuming they're
similar/identical, reflash the proper F5 BIOS (with 2800+ support) for
the + board and reinstall win2000 server accordingly.

I'll give this a go as I flashed it with the other F7 bios. Fortunately,
this continued to work :-) So at least I can flash the F5 version. I'm still
having trouble with the new board so I'm hoping that the correct F5 BIOS
will work.

The problem is a little hard to pin down - even without the 3rd party IDE
card in there, it still has trouble rebooting sometimes. Also, Windows 2000
Server install complains about missing files during installation which hints
at IDE trouble.

Also, after a few reboots, the registry is corrupt. I've had this before
with Gigabyte boards due to not flushing the HDD before reboot. I've
download Windows 2000 Server with SP4 from MSDN to see if this helps.

The other concern is that the RAM is very close to the hard disk drives with
the existing case. Spinning magentic media only a few cm from the RAM
doesn't seem entirely sensible. Might buy a new case just in, err, case.

Cheers, Rob.