KT7 Raid- too many pci cards??

[mitymouse]

Has anyone else had a problem with their raid setup after adding in one more pci card? I have a two drive raid 0 array setup with each drive as the master on IDE3 and IDE4 respectively. All is well until I add in another PCI card to the system. The working configuration includes an AGP Radeon A-I-W, Intel Pro 100+ NIC, and a SB Live X-Gamer. When I attempt to add in any other PCI card that I have, the system will boot fine but will lock up if scandisk or norton disk doctor is run on the raid array. (Again, this works just fine before adding the 3rd pci card in.) I have checked for IRQ conflicts, there are none. In fact, one of the cards that I have tried is a Voodoo2 card, which does not require an IRQ. I am at a loss to explain this one- as a workaround, connecting the raid as master/slave on IDE3 works fine, but I am not thrilled with the reduction in drive performance this causes. I would much rather have it work as master/master (which is how Abit and Highpoint both detail as the proper way to make the connections.) Aside
from this (somewhat nitpicky) problem the board is running quick and stable. I should also mention that this occurs with the bios defaults loaded, as well as when the bios is 'tweaked' for performance. Thanks for any info!

System specs:
Win 98 SE (ACPI enabled)
Via 4.25a drivers where necessary
Thunderbird 1100 (not overclocking)
Abit KT7 Raid (WW Bios, 1.03b1 HPT370 bios and drivers)
256MB Crucial PC133 CAS2
Antec PP403x power supply
ATI Radeon All-In-Wonder AGP
Intel Pro 100+ Management NIC (PCI #2)
3dfx Voodoo2 (PCI #3)
SB Live X-gamer (PCI #4)
Maxtor 51536U3 (15 GB UDMA 66, IDE 1)
2 Maxtor 5T040H4 (40 GB UDMA 100, IDE 3)

 

[mastertech01]

are you using the slot that shares with the HPT370 controller? Try it with a different slot..

 

[mitymouse]

I thought that could be the problem too- but Abit literature shows that PCI #5 is the one that shares with the HPT370. Plus, I've tried moving the card to other slots, and the behavior is always the same. You don't even have to load drivers for the card- it is like just the presence of it there causes this problem. I did notice that ACPI shows up as being on the same IRQ as the HPT, but this occurs whether or not the other card is present or not.

In a couple years of putting together systems, this is one of the stranger problems I've seen!

Thanks for the suggestion though- I do appreciate it!

 

[imonarock]

Im having the same problem...

I have a KT7a-raid (raid enabled) with ...
AIW Radeon
Realtek Ethernet PCI
Diamond Monster mx400 PCI

The minute I add a Maxtor Firewire PCI card the system will boot, then lock up randomly. Sometimes it boots but with my sound disabled and works. I remove the Maxtor Firewire card and the problem is gone. Everything is sharing IRQ 11. A few people are telling me to disable ASPI with a reinstall, but I cant beleive Win2k cant handle this on its own.

 

[mitymouse]

Unfortunately, I don't have much experience yet with windows 2000, although I thought that the ACPI support is a little better there. I do know that it is common for all of your PCI devices to be on IRQ 11, and as long as all the cards support IRQ sharing there should be no problem.

I have used your particular sound card before, and one of the things that always caused a hassle was its SB16 emulation mode (requires it's own IRQ). I am wondering if that might be part of the problem. Check to see if it is enabled, and if so try disabling it.

Sorry I can't be of more help-

 

[grendelkhan]

I am having the EXACT SAME PROBLEM, only in my caser it's progressively worse: I'm getting lockups randomly on Wink2's install. Is this really a PCI problem?? I was starting to think that it was driver related, but after installing the 1.03b drivers, I still cannot run Sandra benchmarks on my hard drives! I was pulling my hair out last night trying to figure this one out.

Maybe after I finish all my IMS-365 and IST-426 (statistics and visual basic) I'll try another flush and reinstall without any cards but the NIC and video.

My card layout is as follows:
PCI6/ISA Shared: Intel 10/100+ Pro (PCI)
PCI 5: Empty
PCI4: SB Live Value
PCI3: Adaptec external SCSI controller
PCI2: Empty
PCI1: Empty
AGP: AOpen Geforce 2 32MB

ACPI is enabled and all processor/memory timings have been set for stability rather than performance. Anyone had good luck on this one?

 

[1gemini1]

I have this config w/no problems and I ran scandisk inside win98.
Abit KT7a Raid (WW Bios, 1.03b1 HPT370 bios and drivers)


Device Class,,,,,,,,IRQ...............AGP V5
IDE Contr.,,,,,,,,,,,14...............Slot 1 Empty
Serial Bus Contr.,,,,,9...............Slot 2 Empty
"...............",,,,,,,,9...............Slot 3 Linksys Network Card
Multi-Media Device,,,11...............Slot 4 Supramax modem
Input Device,,,,,,,,,NA...............Slot 5 Philips Acoustic Edge
Simple Comm. Contr.,,,9...............Slot 6 Empty
Network Contr.,,,,,,,10...............Shared Empty
Mass Storage Contr.,,11
Display Contr.,,,,,,,,5
ACPI Contr.,,,,,,,,,,11

I hope this helps. (I really need to upgrade my rig page)

 

[mitymouse]

I tend to think that it is driver related since scandisk will run on the raid array fine when run from a DOS boot disk or windows startup disk. It is once the drivers are loaded within windows that the problem crops up. I don't think that this is the only thing going on, but I feel it is part of it.

 

[1gemini1]

Did you try deleting your devices one at a time from the device manager? When windows tries to recognize them at start up just cancel until your problem goes away (run the app that caused you problems). Then you can at least pinpoint the problem. LMK

 

[grendelkhan]

I am going to try for a total reformat, with the 1.30b drivers, vice these 1.2 and see if that helps. The more I'm thinking about how my lockups started, the more I see it related to RAID. When I first loaded Win2k on a straight up partition, I had zero issues.

Oh well, so I deal with 2 45gb drives, they're still bloody fast!

Wish me luck.

 

[grendelkhan]

!!!!

No problems now! Totally stable, all options tweaked out, and everything is running as smooth as can be. It was the RAID config the entire time!!

Ugh... that was half the reason behind buying this board in the first place. Oh well, two drives and three partitions still isn't bad, right??

 

[mitymouse]

Nope, it's not 'bad'... but I just get a little bugged when we pay a bit extra for a 'feature' that we wind up not using, or even worse disabling. I am still hopeful that this problem can be solved... I have checked a couple other forums, there are several others posts out there that are similar, so we're not alone!

 

[imonarock]

Please keep me posted with any fixes you find. I searched on the usenet and found people in the same boat. There has to be an answer. I bought this board specifically for the Raid. Well I can always run without that last pci device. Hell NO!

ron@kona.net:disgust:

 

[imonarock]

Here is another long discussion on the problem. Im surprised more people are not running into this.

Link

 

[grendelkhan]

I concur. The RAID functionality was crucial to me as well, in the buying process. Really, the RAID and the jumperless multiplier settings along with all the positive reviews made me jump on this board as soon as it hit the streets. I honestly have to wonder if Asus owners have this kind of issue?

 

[copperdude]

I have Abit KT7A-Raid working 100% fine includng the RAID with the following controllers pluged in on it:
- Hercules GeForce256 DDR-DVI
- Aver TV98 TV Tuner
- Pinnacle DV300 - two in one Adaptec 2940UW and IEEE 1394 (Firewire)
- Adaptec 2940 UW SCSI
- Creative Live Platinum
- 3Com 10/100 NIC
- Creative DxR3 DVD decoder
Have in mind that I do noncompressed vodeo on the RAID with 4x75GB IBM HDD's. I have both WinME and Win2000 installed and both work fine with the hardware. I have to confess that the setup of the system took me about 4-5 hours, but since then, already 2 weeks everything seems to be perfect. The RAID controller shares IRQ with the Ethernet card without conflicts. I think that the key to the success with more complicated setups is in using the latest drivers and BIOS versions. If certain order of the controllers doesn't work, just switch their places until they feel good. I think that this is one of the best ABIT's motherboards we've seen so far.

 

[imonarock]

If its not too much trouble could you list the versions of drivers you have installed?

Thanks,

 

[mitymouse]

Also if you could please list the array type (0, 1 etc) and the manner in which you have the drives connected to the HPT370.

Thanks!

 

[imonarock]

I tried once again last night to get things going.

My system works great with the following....

AIW Radeon AGP
PCI slot 1 = empty
PCI slot 2 = diamond mx400
PCI slot 3 = realtek ethernet
PCI slot 4 = empty
PCI slot 5 = empty
PCI slot 6 = empty

Raid 0 with 2- IBM 45Gig ATA100

Now if I add my Maxtor Firewire PCI in any of the available slots. Sandra will freeze on the disk bench test. If I remove the sound card and replace with the maxtor firewire, I have no problem as well. These problems didnt change with the VIA 4 in 1 (4.25) drivers. My RAID driver is 1.03b. I did notice that when I tried the 4.28 VIA's I went from a 38000 disk bench to a measley 17000. WTF?? The system only freezes on disk access. At this rate the case cover will never go on.

 

[imonarock]

My system finally runs stable and fast. Of course I had to give something up. That something was ACPI. I now can have a full load of PCI devices, with no lockups. I completed Sandra Disk Bench at 38000. Ive heard this advice before but I didnt want to give up ACPI. Now my computer wont auto shutdown. But its a minor tradeoff.

Remove ACPI.

Right click My Computer
Left click Manage
Open Device Manager
Click on Computer
Right click on ACPI and update the driver
Choose to see all available drivers
Select Standard PC.

Reboot your machine and your devices will be re-detected.
C-ya

 

[grendelkhan]

But again, is this something we should have to do? I'm personally pissed off over this. While I love my system, I can't help but feel that Asus owners down't have this issue. I didn't pay Abit prices for this to come out and bite me in the ass like this.

 

[mitymouse]

Progress!

Well, it's too early to call it a total success, but I have definitely made some progress. Like imonarock, I decided to try disabling ACPI. So, I got brave and modified the WZ01 bios with modbin to allow disabling of ACPI in the bios. I then proceeded to flash the bios, reformat the drive and install Windows98 (passing the /p i setup switch to the setup executable, which disables ACPI in the windows setup), and then the Windows 98SE upgrade. After installing all the drivers, I'm happy to report that the RAID 0 array is happy as master/master on IDE 3 and IDE 4. I also used the Via 4.28 4-in-1 drivers, but I am relatively convinced that disabling ACPI is what made the difference. In fact, I have an image of the drive before installing the 4.28 drivers so I can go back to that and make sure that this didn't cause the improvement.

Again, I don't have a lot of time on the system in this configuration, so I can't say that it is truly stable yet or anything. I do know that I can run scandisk or Norton Disk Doctor on the RAID, as well as Speed Disk and defragmenter. Also, I have been able to run HD Tach as well as Sandra to benchmark the drives. I left the system running Folding@home all night, and awoke to a system still running fine this morning!

At this point I am not sure if the problem is with Abit's implementation of ACPI, or possibly the Voodoo2's lack of support for it. Although it is a tradeoff (and I'm not happy about that) the loss of ACPI is to me a minor one compared to the gain in RAID performance and functionality. I don't know that it is a solution for everyone, but it has gotten me a little farther...

 

[TheDork]

Just wanted to report my experience with this problem. The symptoms were pretty much the usual

W2K
Raid 0 on IDE3 Cable Select & IDE4 Cable Select
AGP Voodoo3 3000
3Com 10/100 NIC
Creative Soundblaster MP3/5.1

Worked fine. Then I tried to install

Pyro 1394

Lockups. Went nuts trying to fix - the usual trying all permutations of PCI slots, bumping down to Standard PC, etc. Nothing worked.

Finally stumbled across reports of the "4th expansion card" problem.

Went home that night, simply took drive off IDE4 and popped it onto IDE3 (with it's raid 0 partner) Cable Select.

Voila! No lockups.

Wonder if there will be a BIOS update to fix this?

Jeff

 

[tracerbullet]

I had the KT7A RAID for a little while, RMA'd it. If you have ANYTHING plugged into IDE #4, you CAN'T have more than 3 PCI cards. #PCI and an ISA is OK, but 4 PCI's is not. No one has solved it that I ever saw.

I RMA'd it and got the MSI instead. VERY HAPPY with it, not one problem. I had several with the Abit.

One possibility was to put both drives on IDE #3. One as Master, the other as slave. It does work... Sounds horrible, but apparently the benchmarks are about the same. I didn't try it though, with the other problems I just said screw it and traded it.