MSI k7t-Turbo raid - performance issues?

[charlener]

I've been running this motherboard for a while now and I'm starting to get really odd hardware issues...initially, I had a sblive platinum -- suddenly, after a reinstall of win2k, the comp wouldn't recognize it and then started causing the comp to blue screen all the time. It worked for a while when I tried winXP, but then the same problems. I sold the card since I was short on money and use the onboard sound now. However, now I'm getting data corruption problems, i.e. files downloaded from, say, macromedia's trial site are corrupted or copying a jpeg results in some error where the picture's messed up a little bit. There's also been more significant lag lately, i.e. not being able to handle winamp3 and opening a word document at the same time without lots of stuttering sound and mouse lag. The whole time I've also been getting irql errors or page fault errors => blue screen. Yesterday my comp decided it didn't like my front bay USB hub anymore and recognizes it as an unknown device when before it's always autodetected. grrrrr...does this stuff happen all the time? Is it really the motherboard at all?

As far as my setup, I have a t-bird 1.4 gig, 60 gig RAID 0, 30 gig ide, generic memory, voodoo3 2000 (never caused me a problem), and a generic 350W PS.

 

[Iron Woode]

how much ram?

could be anything causing these problems.

A corrupt windows install.

Bad drivers.

I use the non-raid version and it rocks under winXP with SBLive!.

 

[charlener]

Hrm...I have 320 meg ram and I just did a clean install of XP...I reinstall every 6 months or so...

 

[NesuD]

had a bunch of problems very similar to some of yours. Wrote zeros to the HDD and then repartitioned and formatted and everything was all better. Don't ask me to explain it because i can't but sometimes especially after reformatting a few times something gets wigged out on the hdd that formatting doesn't correct. writing zeros allows you to basically start with a clean slate.

 

[Regalk]

Under WIn2K/WInXP formatting doesn't always work unless you erase the MBR as well. Kill that and you are fine. Therefore do a fdisk and format plus win2k's delete partition and create new to really get a new MBR going.

 

[charlener]

out of curiosity, which problems were solved with starting out fresh with a new MBR?

 

[NesuD]

writing zeros effectively erases the MBR as well as anything else. Zeroing the drive cured what basically seemed like a very unstable system with regular bluescreens, something in the ausio device install. It could detect the sound card fine and install the drivers but in sound controllers in control panel it said there was no audio device installed, It also kept losing the video drivers a generally corrupting files. The root of all of this was a memory module that went bad. removing the dimm though did not help completely as i would still get a bluescreen trying to run windows setup. it wasn't until i zeroed the drive that everything started to behave correctly again. That memory apparently corrupted something on the hdd that a format would not fix. as a matter of fact i couldn't even get as far as formatting in XP's setup.

Good Luck!