Help with KT7A....

[Tcruzi]

I can't seem to get my KT7A and 1.0 ghz athlon up and running. Hell, I haven't been able to get win98 to install without blue screening =p

My setup is:
Abit KT7A-raid
2X Kingston 256meg
2X IBM 30gig
ATI Radeon 32meg DDR AGP
InWIN atx case with a 300watt PS

I have a SB live and generic network card also but I pulled them from this system in hopes of isolating what the problem could be. I've set all of the memory timing to the slowest fail-safe settings and that doesn't help either. After booting up from the CD, fdisking and formating the array, the installation goes smoothly until it reboots for the first time and starts the "finalizing hardware settings", without fail everytime it gets to this step and starts to setup up any plug and pray devices the installation blue screens with the same error message, "fatal exception at 0E", I don't remember the rest of it, but its always the same fatal exception at 0E. What could be causing this ? I've tried fail safe memory settings, using only one 256meg module, pulling out all the cards in the system except for the video card. Any help would be appreciated.

Don

 

[DrewsNick]

go with nothing but the vid and one ram stick. if that no good try the other ram stick? try a diff vid card?
Try to reseat the cpu? try that cpu on anohter board? ask around about flashing the bios? not sure if I would do that right off but if you tried all else.....

 

[ac1d]

are you putting your ram in bank 0/1? Have you tried clearing the cmos?

 

[grendelkhan]

You're running in RAID-0, yes?

If so, this is a problem that has been seen quite a bit, and you have a couple of solutions:

1. Disable ACPI and let APM do all the work
2. Don't run the RAID config and let the drives set up solo

Here's a thread that's been going on that details all this.

 

[Tcruzi]

Yeppers, I'm running a RAID 0 setup with my hard drives. I've looked all over but I can't seem to find a way to disable ACPI in the bios. However I don't know if that will really help me, at the moment I have only my video card, the ATI Radeon on the board. I don't have any other pci cards in the computer at all. I've also disabled the onboard serial and parallel ports. In terms of free irqs, I have a ton of them free =p What are "fatal exception" errors ? Its the same error almost every time..."fatal exception 0E at some address". I'm at my wit's end. Thanks for the help.

Don

 

[grendelkhan]

Did you have the other PCI cards in when you did the initial install? That screwed me up as well. Something about the whole RAID and PCI cards thing that this board does not like.

I think the way that some people disabled ACPI was to turn on "Power Management by APM" and then disable "Plug and Play OS Installed".

I think.

 

[sad]

try this:

get into bios>Advanced Chipset Features> disable AGPX4 and Fastwrite. Set your AGP Driving Control to 68.

 

[TRD]

I have seen a similar problem to this when you have the <virusprotection> selection enabled in the BIOS. dont kow if it will solve it but Ive ran into it before.....

ALSO to disable ACPI you have to use the modbin program to actually modify a BIOS before updating your chip..... Its a selection thats not visible in the &quot;normal&quot; BIOS but it is there.... I found the program needed and all instructions at the infamous PAULS KT7 QUESTIONS...... anyne have the link? I think I got it thru www.apushardware.com