Now I've heard and had heard wonderful things about the Iwill DVD266-R, so I went out and bought one. And then...
It would seem to me that in all my travels throughout the net, I am the only one to have trouble with the Iwill DVD266-R board. Or am I? I am asking to see if anyone has the same trouble getting stability (or getting anything) out of the board. I bought the board in May, and Iwill hasn't put out any new BIOS drivers since then, so I'm assuming that all's good and well...
My system config is:
Iwill DVD266-R
2 PIII-733s
3dfx Voodoo3 3500 TV AGP
Maxi Sound Fortissimo
An undetermined amount of RAM (this is part of my problem).
Now there are multiple problems really, so I'll start with the most basic, at bootup.
Problem 1: I can't get any lasting sort of stability running 512 (or more than 256) megs of RAM. I have two types of RAM, one PC2100 CAS2 Samsung, the other PC2100 CAS2.5 Corsair, each in the form of two 256MB modules. Now, running with ONE stick of memory, and it doesn't matter which kind, poses no problem. Putting two in of different kinds fails, even when forcing CAS2, and putting in two of the same kinds causes poor stability (i.e. It'll boot up correctly at first, but on a reboot it gives the continuous long beep, meaning that the memory is placed in incorrectly.)
No amount of BIOS fiddling will fix this.
Next problem concerns the CONSTANT memory dumps I am getting.
Problem 2: This isn't a problem persay, but a MAJOR inconvienence. Because I can't run Win2K (I'll get to that in a sec) I am relagated to running good 'ol NT4, Service Pack 6. This works fine for most of the time, but it is INCREDIBLY erratic. Burn a CD, finish, open Explorer, memory dump. Copy files, memory dump. All of this is sporadic, usually spewing garbage about ntoskrnl.exe. No amount of BIOS fiddling will fix this either.
And last is regarding Win2K, which I SO want to run.
Problem 3: I can't install Win2K at all. With system cache on, the Win2K install first stage (blue screens) will crash and give me IRQs_NOT_FOUND, and more of the general useless Windows error messages. With system cache disabled (as Microsoft Troubleshooter so artfully recommends) it will get past the blue window stage, and reboot, only to hang on the Starting Up... stage. Turning system cache back on forces Windows to generate more lovely stop codes, and going into Safe Mode sans system cache informs me that the Catalog files failed to install.
Now, I love the speed that the 733s are giving me, as I used to run a Seattle2 with a PII300. However, NOT being able to run ANYTHING isn't exactly my idea of a good time. Any help that can be offered to ANY of these problems will be greatly appreciated.
And last, some of the things I've heard, but haven't tried:
Turn off USB when installing Win2K.
Instead of plugging the IDE drives into the IDE controller, instead plug them into the RAID plugs.
Thanks,
RustJive:disgust:
It would seem to me that in all my travels throughout the net, I am the only one to have trouble with the Iwill DVD266-R board. Or am I? I am asking to see if anyone has the same trouble getting stability (or getting anything) out of the board. I bought the board in May, and Iwill hasn't put out any new BIOS drivers since then, so I'm assuming that all's good and well...
My system config is:
Iwill DVD266-R
2 PIII-733s
3dfx Voodoo3 3500 TV AGP
Maxi Sound Fortissimo
An undetermined amount of RAM (this is part of my problem).
Now there are multiple problems really, so I'll start with the most basic, at bootup.
Problem 1: I can't get any lasting sort of stability running 512 (or more than 256) megs of RAM. I have two types of RAM, one PC2100 CAS2 Samsung, the other PC2100 CAS2.5 Corsair, each in the form of two 256MB modules. Now, running with ONE stick of memory, and it doesn't matter which kind, poses no problem. Putting two in of different kinds fails, even when forcing CAS2, and putting in two of the same kinds causes poor stability (i.e. It'll boot up correctly at first, but on a reboot it gives the continuous long beep, meaning that the memory is placed in incorrectly.)
No amount of BIOS fiddling will fix this.
Next problem concerns the CONSTANT memory dumps I am getting.
Problem 2: This isn't a problem persay, but a MAJOR inconvienence. Because I can't run Win2K (I'll get to that in a sec) I am relagated to running good 'ol NT4, Service Pack 6. This works fine for most of the time, but it is INCREDIBLY erratic. Burn a CD, finish, open Explorer, memory dump. Copy files, memory dump. All of this is sporadic, usually spewing garbage about ntoskrnl.exe. No amount of BIOS fiddling will fix this either.
And last is regarding Win2K, which I SO want to run.
Problem 3: I can't install Win2K at all. With system cache on, the Win2K install first stage (blue screens) will crash and give me IRQs_NOT_FOUND, and more of the general useless Windows error messages. With system cache disabled (as Microsoft Troubleshooter so artfully recommends) it will get past the blue window stage, and reboot, only to hang on the Starting Up... stage. Turning system cache back on forces Windows to generate more lovely stop codes, and going into Safe Mode sans system cache informs me that the Catalog files failed to install.
Now, I love the speed that the 733s are giving me, as I used to run a Seattle2 with a PII300. However, NOT being able to run ANYTHING isn't exactly my idea of a good time. Any help that can be offered to ANY of these problems will be greatly appreciated.
And last, some of the things I've heard, but haven't tried:
Turn off USB when installing Win2K.
Instead of plugging the IDE drives into the IDE controller, instead plug them into the RAID plugs.
Thanks,
RustJive:disgust: