Please god. Anyone read this. I pray you can help me. It will take a little time. Please I beg of you.

[prettykewl]

I bought the MSI Pro 2-a. I have it running with a IBM 75Gxp 45gb, Sb Live. I now have it updated to the latest bios 2.24 I believe. I was having problems with the mouse cursor being jerky sometimes and series of blue screens which there was no way I could get out of. Other times the system would halt. On my monitor there would be half black and half windows desktop. But it was frozen. I was going through hell. Now here I am. I went through super kimi's procedure of trying to reformat.

1. Create a floppy boot disk with CDROM drivers
2. Update latest bios. (follow bobcostas instructions)
3. Boot to floppy disk with CDrom Drivers and choose option to boot with CDrom.
4. at C:\ type: format c: /q
5. repeat step four for any additional drives you may have substituting the "c:" with corresponding drive letter, i.e. "d:"
6. Put in your OS cd into the cdrom and get to your cdrom root directory, usually e: or f:
7. at cdrom root, type: 'cd win98' or win9x for win98/winme and press 'enter'. Then type 'setup' and press enter. For win2k type: 'cd i386' and press 'enter' then type 'winnt' and press 'enter'(If you are going to duel boot, I suggest install win98 or winme first, then install win2k, because win2k can easily setup a dual boot option for you).
8. Follow prompts for OS installation
9. After OS has installed, do the following in this order.
a. Install latetest via 4in1 drivers from webpage. (no beta) reboot system
b. install directx 8.0a (or which ever may be latest directx at that time). reboot system
c. go to windowsupdate and install latest patches and fixes, for win2k install sp1 (sp2 if available at that time) reboot system
d. install latest video card drivers. reboot system
e. install rest of the drivers needed for any other devices. reboot system

After doing this I though it was working. Before I formatted I had put all my mp3's on cd. I went to tranfeer them all but it locked. The picture on my monitor just froze. So I dis enabled DMA on my hardrive a cd-roms. Instead of taking 3 min. it took 12min. With a really jerky mouse but it did not freeze. So I went and installed the 3.11 busmaster drivers with vxd enabling dma. I tried transfer the mp3's again it froze with the windows desktop again but it was half black. And on the half black side there were green hash marks at the top. Should I just send this damn thing to MSI or does anybody know anything I can do. I shread of help is greatly appreciated. BTW I am a first time system builder. Thanks again

:frown:

 

[scorpioLP]

Is heat an issue ???

are you overclocking ???

I've always stayed away from the latest DirectX stuff, just because of problems in the past. Does anyone know if issues with the latest version ??

Have you tried copying other CDs onto the hard drive ???

 

[jeremy806]

I would start by removing all cards except the video card and see if everything works. Then, add cards one at a time, testing things each time. That should help you narrow down the problem.

jeremy806

 

[prettykewl]

yes I tried copying other cd's. No I am not overclocking. I am not having a heat issue. My cpu temp never goes above 50 deg.

 

[nortexoid]

remove everything except the video card and harddrive...

install the via 3.1.1 ide busmaster driver, install the miniport one (not the VxD one), and use the DMA utility and set your drive's DMA to mode 4.

see if that works.

 

[Snoop]

2.24 bios??
I built a pro 2a a few weeks back, it had the 2.2 bios, had problems in windows 2000, put in the 2.4bios, works perfectly

How do you have your cables plugged up? Master on middle plug, slave on end plug?
Also, jumpers are set correctly?

 

[Planktune]

the 686b chip in the via chipset is suck. especially with the ibm gxp's. I was going to get this board until I heard about this problem.
There is a fix somewhere. I read about it in this forum. but it's the IBM drive I pretty sure. check thier site maybe it's fixed. I wish I could be more help. Try using a different HD if you have one

 

[prettykewl]

a fix, I pray if anyone has it the see my post

 

[Adul]

I think if you set your drive to a ulta DMA 66 or 33 MOde it got past the problems with the via south bridge. Go to IBM's website and see if they have this ultility.

 

[Adul]

IBM feature tool

this will let you set the different protcals for your IBM drive.

I got it from this page

http://www.storage.ibm.com/techsup/hddtech/welcome.htm

 

[velvtelvis]

are you using cheapie ram by any chance?

I use asus personaly, but it couldn't hurt to make sure you've not tweaked any BIOS settings that don't need to be. If the 4-in-one driver gives the option of instaling the AGP driver in regular or turbo mode, go with regular.

These things helped me stay stable until i could get everything ironed out and patched.

 

[prettykewl]

Thanks you adul for finding that util. It might just work. BTW what is that IDE tool folder that comes with the bus master drivers. When I try to click the exe in there it says it only works with Via busmaster or something like that. And I believe I have it under hard drive controllers.

 

[Snoop]

If you have the latest via 4in1's, then the gxp isnt your problem

 

[BrainSalad]

This is something I just though of that might be causing your problems.
Are you using a so called "back up" copy of your OS cd-rom? Maybe when you made your "back up" copy somehow it was a bad burn and some OS files are corrupt. Just my 2 cents worth

 

[Tominator]

...just throwing another 2 cents in the pot btw...

I had the same problems with a BP6 using Western Digital drives. If the drives were configured via the Western Digital Software to enable ATA100, I had all kinds of problems. The ATA100 was enabled by default btw.

After I changed the drives, once again using the software, back to ATA66, they worked fine.