My Dream Machine is killing me

[blaker7]

I have 800eb,be6-2,Abit gf256, sb live plat.,
kenwood 72x, plextor 8432cdrw,56k mo blas, ls
120. I put em all together with a 20gig WD and fresh inst WIN98SE, loaded my soft ware, rebooted cold 12x and went to bed. I got up and booted and no hd would come up in bios,
(latest) and the drive(6mos old) made clattering noise. I bought a new 15.3gig WD,
did it all again, went to bed. got up and booted and same thing. I slipped in a 6gig
Caviar WD I had and loaded it up and joined this forum. I got the be6-2 because of its rep. I need some help, thoughts, ideas.
Thank you, blaker7

[buitenb]

he dude use some very good pc 133 mem and set the agp mode to normal and upgrade the bios to the newest and i know because i have the same board with a pIII 600/133 eb

[blaker7]

Can you name some excellent PC133 memory? Is micron good? Mine just says "made in the USA" And where is the choice for "normal" in VGA mode. I have the latest for my v1.1, BEH_RV. It flashed in fine. I brought the bus down to 100Mhz, I've grounded the hard drives and still can't bring up the 15 or 20 gig in bios. only the little 6gig will go in and show up. I can bring up the 15 gig as a slave but that sucks. Theres got to be a bios setting screwed up. I've been all over the bios and I guess I don't know sh**. I'm burnin out, maybe I'll go fishing.

[Glynn R Harris]

Blaker7;
I notice you like Western Digitals. Are you using their Data Lifeguard/EZ-Install software to partition and format, or FDISK and FORMAT in DOS from floppy, or what?

The bigger drives, your BIOS, and the Win FAT32 system are areas to explore here. It seems like what is happening is that after you power down, your computer can no longer read the boot track... which to me, lays the blame on a proprietary formatting system like EZ-Drive or Ontrack Disk Manager.

'Course, I could be all wet. What kind of fish ya got there?

[blaker7]

Well I'm sorry to say I fdisk'd and formatted off of a slightly fattened 98SE booter and I kinda figured the BE62 bios would support "Large' and shoot I mean I slid those parts together and put good solid 98SE OS and shouldered my way through the IRQ gauntlet and the machine was fat. I couldn't believe it. I think you might have something with the drive not keeping their boot enabling parameters. Isn't ATA66 backward compatable and the BE62 as well? I'm hashin over old thoughts; I think the HD"s are still good. Good last name, and trout, bass, blues, anything swimmin in Maine. Thanks, Blake Harris.

[bhess]

Did you try the HD's on ide 1or2? Just to see if it is the ata/66. Did you install the highpoint drivers? Also the pci slot 3 (I think) conflicts with the highpoint driver. Try removing all pci cards except video and try that. Then add each card one by one, and check.
just shooting out ideas

[blaker7]

Bhess, Presently I have the 6gig HD on IDE1 with an LS120. IDE2 has the Kenwood and the Plextor. At this time the Hi point drivers are not loaded and ATA66 is diabled in bios. I have nothing on the IDE3 IDE4 channels. My 1st new clean assembly and boot was done as you advise, that is nothing in the box but board, cpu and video card(AGP), cdrom and floppy. I then put in the sound card(creative platinum) and then the s blaster modem. A little juggling but not bad. And in between any changes I checked everything to make sure all the sharing and settings were correct, and rebooted cold between any changes.
The little 6gig has System Commander 2000 on it(which I have good experience with) and when I shut down last night, windows didn't shut down. I rebooted and scandisk took off finding no errors,..but when I again rebooted Sys Commander popped up a screen saying "Write Protected..access type-hard disk write". The only choice was to hit 'Ignore Item" and it did and continued booting successfully, but now it does it every boot. Can a bios setting elect a change in disk recognition beyond 33/66. How can a write protection be installed on non removable medium? Keep firing thoughts, We'll get this sucker yet. I'm wondering if Sys Commander 2000 being on the 6gig is the only reason I haven't lost that hd as well? Don't go there Blake, keep it simple. The be62 manual says pci slot 3 shares IRQ with the HTP366 controller, and that slot 5 shares IRQ with 2.And that slot 5 and the HTP366 share the same bus master control signals. My sound card is in pci slot 2 and my modem is in 3 but I do not have the 66 drivers installed and in fact I disabled com1 and have an extra IRQ(4), so I think I'm OK there. Go figure!

[This message has been edited by blaker7 (edited 06-22-2000).]

[blaker7]

OK so that whole write protect thing with System Commander 2000 was caused by virus detection in bios being enabled. I disabled it and that issue is gone.By the way, I just found that unchecking "disable fast shutdown" in-prog,accessories,sys tools,sys info,tools,sys config utility,advanced.. will result in Win98SE constantly rebooting at shutdown. Safe mode off of f8 at boot allows changing it back. Have they got a switch backwards?

[This message has been edited by blaker7 (edited 06-22-2000).]

[blaker7]

I'd just like to add some more wierdness...When I started this I could control the CPU clocking in bios and it reflected the changes at boot. Now boot always says my(733) is 550-100front, no matter what it is set at in bios. I'm gonna start gettin brave here with these hard drives, so you might lose me for a couple of days. Please keep me in mind hey, I could go IRQustal.

[blaker7]

OK I checked out the two hd's. The 20gig wd is dead, but the 15gig showed up on my friends bios and my sweet sys install was there and intact. I called another friend with a be62 and his club bought 6 be62 boards and had no problems like I'm talkin about. He just called back and its sounds to them like a bad "controller" on the board. Hes gone for a week so I couldn't ask more. Is there a way to check out this "contoller" or should ...oh heck, Should I just send it back and get it replaced?

[Glynn R Harris]

The BE6-II has a real good rep. Overclockers seem to like this board, and that says a lot, since a crummy board just does not stand the punishments of the o/c crowd well. So I think you did right buying this board.

You don't, however, have the facility to to diagnose a failed or possibly failing controller. I would go to your retailer and get a replacement board, if possible.

Man, this project has put ya through it, huh? If it's any consolation, when you get it all back together and running, in three days you'll forget all the trials and be figuring out what other hardware to add to it... http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/wink.gif

[blaker7]

Glynn, I bought the board on the net but anticipate no trouble getting a replacement. And you know I've been there , at the end of three days and we DO move on and it keeps it fun, for the most part. This board is inspiring, informative and a welcome avenue for help and connecting with one another. I'll be back, thanks Glynn and all.

[This message has been edited by blaker7 (edited 06-23-2000).]