ABIT KT7A and Western Digital HDDs

[DocPC]

Nice to see youa gain, Darren.

[RebelJ]

Along with Darrens points, one other thing sticks out - are you using ata-100 drive cables? it may be possible that using the older style of drive ribbon cable is causing issues with your drives - exp if they are ata-100 drives.

[Humilliation]

Thanks for all of the replies guys. Motherboard revision is 1.3. The memory I have is Micron PC133 and I've run tests on it and they've all passed, that took a long time with Goldmems memory tester. The ribbon cable I'm using with my HDD came with the motherboard, it looks to be one of them so called 80-pin cables, it's got the smaller wires. The harddrive I have has no problems running in another system, it's just got problems in mine. I tried my HDD in one of my friends computers with no problems with Speed disk or Windows disk defragger. I also didn't have any problem installing Windows 2000 Pro on it with my CD while it was in my freinds system, no data corruption. I just don't get it.

I've got a V5 5500 AGP and the BIOS is set at AGP 2x. I think I'm gonna try another BIOS, ver 4A or 4T. 4A or 4T's the only BIOSs that say they support 1400/133(without any bugs reported). I don't know, I've tried everything else. I'm gonna be getting an L&C 400w PSU, it's the same PSU my friend has in his system. It should be OK, my friend has an AMD 1.4Ghz T-bird,cd-burner,dvd,2 HDDs and an equalizer in his system, plus he's got a bunch of fans all over the place on his case, so I hope this PSU will work fine for me. We tried his PSU in my system and I've been able to get it to run pretty stable up to 1300/100 and that's what makes me think I should try either the 4A or the 4T BIOS, since ver 65 is supposed to support the XP Athlon, that may make a difference?

Pauls KT7 FAQs states that BIOS ver 64 is only for the KT7 and not the KT7A, use ver 65 for KT7A Rev 1.3 only. I've tried 65 so that's why I want to try either 4A or 4T. The stock BIOS ver was 3N.

My system if that may seem to help you guys think of anything else I could try or if you may think there may be incompatabilities, the specs are as follows,

ABIT KT7A REV 1.3 BIOS 65
AMD 1.4 266 T-bird (it's got the C)
3dfx V5 5500 AGP
Sound Blaster PCI 128
Primary Master-WD 12GB UATA\66 HDD not UDMA\100
Secondary Master-HP 8xDVD\32xCD-ROM
3COM 56K
Sony 1.44 Floppy drive

I am grateful to all of you whom have replied, you wouldn't believe how much hair I've lost trying to get this system to run right. Thank you all very much.

Just wanted to add that when I program this system the only cards that are installed are the V5 and the modem. I installed the sound card after I updated the chipset drivers. Are there any specific order of placement for the cards to be installed like modem PCI slot 2 and sound PCI slot 4? As always, thank you guys for all of your help.

[Darren Wilson]

BIOS ver 64 is for the KT7A (rev 1.2, 1.1 & 1.0). If you have a rev 1.3 then the 65 BIOS is the latest official one for your board. The 64 is the BIOS I am running on this KT7A-RAID that I am composing this post on

Like suggested before, try running the drive on a standard 40 wire IDE cable instead of an ATA66/100 cable. Also if you are not already doing so, run the HDD off of the primary IDE controller and not off the Highpoint (if you have the RAID version).

[Humilliation]

Well, I finally got my new power supply, hooked everything up, and everything is like it was before. Ain't that a bitch? I finally decided to do some futzin around in system setup that hasn't been mentioned. I changed the core voltage to 1.800 instead of 1.675 & the I/O voltage to 3.3 instead of 3.5. At least the system boots now everytime and I have no problems with the video now that I changed the AGP driving value to EA. Thanks Darren! I don't have an nvidia video card in the system but that seemed to have worked for the voodoo card. I also changed the PCI master bus time-out to 3 instead of 1, that seemed to of helped. I also no longer have any problems with write verification errors with speed disk, I got an other 80-Pin IDE cable, I guess the one that came with the motherboard was no good.

Thanks goes out to all who replied. Just wanted to let you guys know how everything worked out.