My Shuttle AK31A rev3.1 has gone strange on me..... It started acting bizarre a week ago and now is over the top.
I had a single 100Gig drive connected to IDE 0, CD Burner and standard CD on IDE 1, and a Promise Tech FastTrak 100TX2 RAID card with two IBM GXP60's 40Gig's stripped. Initially I was having problems maintaining my CableModem connection to the internet... then during one of many re-starts my GOBACK utility froze while it was doing an uncommanded repair.... I could not get the computer to get past it so I re-booted and tried again... nothing... re-booted and removed the GoBack utility (no choice). I attempted to run both Norton DD and MS ScanDisk on all drives. The IDE drive went through the through test..., but it took much longer than it should. The Raid has two partitions... a Win98 and an XP partition... ScanDisk made it through the Win98 partition, but crashed going through the XP partition. I switched over to using the IDE drive and ran fine for about a week... then the computer would not boot no matter which drive I tried... when I tried a re-install of windows... the installer saw the second partition (all are FAT32) on the Raid as the C drive and saw nothing else except the CD's.
Thinking I might be on to something I switched the IDE cables such that my HD was now on the IDE1 chain. The computer booted... except now my promise card claims there are no HD's connected to the raid! I have no clue as to why changing the HD from IDE0 to IDE1 would affect the raid connected to the PCI controller card...but it did? I am going to discuss this with Promise on Monday, but I think my motherboard may have serious "issues."
Therefore this long winded post... In reviewing the reviews on both Tom's and Anandtech's web site I do not see any recent reports on AMD motherboards. I am running an XP1700 cpu, and there does not seem to be any compelling reason with my older DDR memory for me to upgrade to the newer 333 memory motherboards. Tom mentioned that several of the Kt266A motherboards now support USB 2.0 and FireWire, but he does not mention which ones.
Given my older DDR memory and 1700+ XP cpu, which motherboard offers STABILITY, speed, and at least USB 2.0... FireWire would also be nice, but I do have one of those on my Audigy card.
thanks in advance,
Steve
I had a single 100Gig drive connected to IDE 0, CD Burner and standard CD on IDE 1, and a Promise Tech FastTrak 100TX2 RAID card with two IBM GXP60's 40Gig's stripped. Initially I was having problems maintaining my CableModem connection to the internet... then during one of many re-starts my GOBACK utility froze while it was doing an uncommanded repair.... I could not get the computer to get past it so I re-booted and tried again... nothing... re-booted and removed the GoBack utility (no choice). I attempted to run both Norton DD and MS ScanDisk on all drives. The IDE drive went through the through test..., but it took much longer than it should. The Raid has two partitions... a Win98 and an XP partition... ScanDisk made it through the Win98 partition, but crashed going through the XP partition. I switched over to using the IDE drive and ran fine for about a week... then the computer would not boot no matter which drive I tried... when I tried a re-install of windows... the installer saw the second partition (all are FAT32) on the Raid as the C drive and saw nothing else except the CD's.
Thinking I might be on to something I switched the IDE cables such that my HD was now on the IDE1 chain. The computer booted... except now my promise card claims there are no HD's connected to the raid! I have no clue as to why changing the HD from IDE0 to IDE1 would affect the raid connected to the PCI controller card...but it did? I am going to discuss this with Promise on Monday, but I think my motherboard may have serious "issues."
Therefore this long winded post... In reviewing the reviews on both Tom's and Anandtech's web site I do not see any recent reports on AMD motherboards. I am running an XP1700 cpu, and there does not seem to be any compelling reason with my older DDR memory for me to upgrade to the newer 333 memory motherboards. Tom mentioned that several of the Kt266A motherboards now support USB 2.0 and FireWire, but he does not mention which ones.
Given my older DDR memory and 1700+ XP cpu, which motherboard offers STABILITY, speed, and at least USB 2.0... FireWire would also be nice, but I do have one of those on my Audigy card.
thanks in advance,
Steve