Soyo 6BA+IV and highpoint drivers
Ok I'm scratching my balding head on this one...
A little sys info first
Soyo 6BA+IV
maxtor diamondmax 7200 rpm ata66
Soundblaster Live! value
Windows 98 version 4.10
ATI Rage Fury
This being the first system I've built utilizing the ata66 interface I have some questions regarding the drivers....
Firstly, the mobo has 4 ide channels...1 + 2 support up to ata33 and 3 + 4 support up to ata66. The system failed to recognize the hard drive when it was connected to either channel 3 or 4 (message indicated primary master failure). When I reinstalled to 1 or 2 the drive worked fine and allowed me to format and load the OS. I then proceeded to install all of the hardware assuming 3 + 4 would not work until the Highpoint drivers were loaded. I loaded the highpoint drivers last and was prompted to reboot-at this point the system failed to fully load windows ( I was presented with a fatal exception 0E error). I was forced to reboot to safe mode, and uninstall the drivers. Windows then loaded fine and continued to do so. I visited highpoint's website and saw that there were some new drivers available (version 1.20) and the release notes indicated there was a problem with maxtor 20.4 diamondmax drives and this had been corrected. I installed the new drivers and met with the same error. On the suggestion of a friend I left the highpoint drivers installed but before rebooting I switched the drive cable to Ide 3 thinking perhaps the drive would now boot there...no go.
If i press F1 at the Primary master failure screen the Hpt bios does show the drive detected and lists it properly but the system hangs on the screen that says Verifying DMI pool data.... I reconnected the Drive to IDE 1, uninstalled the highpoint drivers in safe mode and rebooted-all ok. I did notice however that there are 3 devices sharing IRQ 11 (videocard,soundcard and USB controller)with no conflicts, and it occured to me that perhaps I had an IRQ conflict when the HPT drivers were installed. The system configuration screen though indicated that IRQ 5 was being used for the HPT drivers (after I reinstalled and removed them AGAIN!)
On what might be a connected problem I cannot get any games running in OpenGL mode with all the latest drivers and versions installed (Q3,Tribes and open Gl all running in latest versions)-I had the same hardware running on a different mobo running fine-OpenGl worked great before!
Any ideas,resolutions or comments would be VERY welcomed as I'm out of ideas...
Btw Soyo tech support proved very frustrating and generally useless..I did try a different Harddrive (same make and model and achieved the same results so I'm confident its the HPT366....
Thanks for your time.....
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I used to be uncertain but now I'm not so sure.....
