First post, by Kampfkoloss
- Rank
- Newbie
Hello, after searching the forum for an existing thread with this subject (only found an unsolved thread with a driver problem for a promise card under Win95) I have to ask for a little help. I've built a PC with an Aopen AX6BC-EZ mainboard and a Pentium III 700 (Coppermine, passively cooled, around 40 degree Celsius idle, around 50 under load). The mainboard BIOS is the latest release-version - I don't like installing betas. ACPI is active, onboard PM is disabled, LPT and COM are disabled to free up resources. PNP OS is enabled, Resource assignment is set to AUTO, PCI-Busmastering is enabled, PCI auto assignment is enabled.
Graphics card is a Geforce 2 GTS.
As PCI-Cards there are (in the following order) a Voodoo 2, Promise Ultra66, sb live!, Intel 1000MT NIC. All PCI-Cards are inserted in Bus-Master enabled slots, only the fifth (free) slot is a slave-slot.
Hard Drive (Seagate ST3400014) indicates 206 Interface CRC-Errors. Surface is fine (checked by MHDD under linux and scandisk under dos). So no real problems here.
Operating systems tried are: Windows 98SE (no updates), Windows 2000 SP4, Windows XP Pro SP3. No software, except for a modified samsung/lexar USB-Driver for a USB-Stick in Windows 98 has been installed.
Installing Chipset-Drivers for the mainboard (Intel 440ZX, Driver-3.20.2008 source: philscomputerlab) results in much longer boot times than with the native windows 98 SE-drivers (It takes almost 45 seconds at the dos-screen with autoexec.bat options. without the drivers the boot process literally flies by!). Windows 2000 and XP don't accept installing chipset-drivers, indicating their native drivers are more recent than the ones I'm trying to install.
Lets go to the main problem I'm confronted with: The Installation of the the most recent Drivers for my Promise-Card results in a frozen boot screen. Before and since upgrading the cards BIOS to version 2000 build 18 (most recent one). With the most recent BIOS and the oldest avaiable drivers (1.60) the boot process is relatively slow for this machine and the OS feels sluggish. Windows 2000 freezes completely at boot, when installing the latest promise drivers. Hard Drive is the only Drive hooked to the Promise.
Moving around PCI-Cards to assign different resources automatically is not resolving the issue.
I don't think its a mainboard-, temperature- or software problem. I suppose it's a faulty controller card... I hope I'm wrong.
Any ideas and suggestions what else could be done would be very appreciated.
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