Weird...I'll do some googling and see what I can find

Sounds like it's toast though. Obvious question but you have removed the battery for a couple minutes, right?

Edit: If all else fails, perhaps a bios flash might help? If it's just a corrupted bios, theres a good chance you can fix this

Actually I did remember to do this! 😀 Well, I think the CMOS battery was removed for at least 1 minute. I've just this moment had a bit of good luck - I decided to abandon the IDE 1 port, and plugged in the IDE HDD in to the UIDE 1 Raid port - the connectors on these 2 ports are yellow. The connectors on the IDE ports are blue. I enabled the High Point controller inside the BIOS set up area, and I can now boot up OK with the HDD.

The next thing I did was connect a DVD-ROM reader to the IDE port 2. It works, but there's a very curious delay when the BIOS POST message area displays this DVD-ROM information. One last thing - on the mobo, there's a jumper right next to the UIDE Raid ports. It says: JP7 BIOS SELECT. 1-2 Master 2-3 Slave. The problem is that I can't find JP7 on the mobo!

The idea of flashing the BIOS is interesting. I might do this. What I'll do is dig around for the latest Beta BIOS, because I think Vogons user Bestemor needs it.

Just 2 more comments - I've managed to get the HDD to boot in to Windows 98, and the DVD-ROM can be seen OK. The HDD boots up very quickly using the UIDE port! The other thing is that when the High Point controller displays the HDD information during the BIOS POST, it is not in a mixture of upper and lower case - it just displays the HDD ID correctly in all upper case.

About the missing jumper, often when companies build a new generation of boards, they'll make several versions:
A budget version, normal version and deluxe version, along those lines 😉

And often one version might have a feature which another might not, but the one that doesn't might still have it printed on the PCB. I see it all the time 😉

About the highpoint, it uses it's own chip so when something is wrong with the onboard IDE, it usually won't influence the separate chip

Edit: I always remove the battery for like 15 minutes or so. I remove it, drink some coffee or even leave the project for a day, then return to the project. This way I make sure that it's definitely reset 😉

I flashed the mobo's BIOS to the very last version, which is a Beta BIOS. I cleared out all the CMOS memory using switches such as /cc/cp/cd. Unfortunately, the IDE 1 port will not work - the HDD shows up as 136 GB capacity inside the BIOS set up area. I guess I'm lucky as this mobo has an onboard Raid controller!

BTW, the IDE 2 port appears to work OK with the DVD-ROM drive. But let's imagine that the IDE 2 port was also broken. What would I do then? Can you add an optical drive to the UIDE 2 Raid port? (The mobo is switched off at the moment - I've only got one keyboard and I'm using it to type this message on my main internet machine!) If that didn't work, can you add a PCI Raid card which understands how to interact with a DVD-ROM drive, or are these only capable of accepting hard drives?

retro games 100 wrote:

I flashed the mobo's BIOS to the very last version, which is a Beta BIOS. I cleared out all the CMOS memory using switches such as /cc/cp/cd. Unfortunately, the IDE 1 port will not work - the HDD shows up as 136 GB capacity inside the BIOS set up area. I guess I'm lucky as this mobo has an onboard Raid controller!

BTW, the IDE 2 port appears to work OK with the DVD-ROM drive. But let's imagine that the IDE 2 port was also broken. What would I do then? Can you add an optical drive to the UIDE 2 Raid port? (The mobo is switched off at the moment - I've only got one keyboard and I'm using it to type this message on my main internet machine!) If that didn't work, can you add a PCI Raid card which understands how to interact with a DVD-ROM drive, or are these only capable of accepting hard drives?

I never used that onboard raid controller but I reckon it can be used just like any other IDE controller as it may be possible to select somekind of 'IDE' instead of 'RAID' function.
I'd say just try it, it should work...I think!

You can use the onboard IDE even with the limit. It just has a BIOS with the old LBA limitation. Do you really need more than 136GB? A bigger drive will still work but not all of it will be accessible. I have seen WinXP bypass this though and had setup show the full capacity.

The RAID controllers do usually work fine as non-RAID controllers. Sometimes they are faster than the chipset's IDE too. But you will need an F6 floppy w/ drivers for XP. I usually try to keep optical drives off of them though because ATAPI can be trouble with them.

I'm convinced the onboard Raid controller is making general disk access faster than the onboard IDE controller. Also, I should have been clearer in my posts above: all of my HDDs and Compact Flash devices are comfortably under the 136 GB capacity! That is what's making this situation odd. The CF devices that I have unsuccessfully tried with the onboard IDE are just 2 and 4 GB, and the Western Digital HDD is just 80 GB.

Everything seems to be OK-ish. Sometimes the system seems a little bit unresponsive, like (PS/2) mouse clicks only take effect a few seconds after I have clicked the button. But the most odd thing is 3DMark Max 99 benchmarking. I grabbed the nearest AGP card, and it's a passively cooled 16MB Matrox G400. I also grabbed the nearest CPU, and it's a low powered (1.35v) Mobile Barton 2200+ rated CPU. 3DMark 99 goes a bit nuts, reporting a score of -

20642 3DMarks
153700 CPU 3DMarks

I ran it again, and the scores were different: 6882 / 51680. The first figure seems OK, but the second seems too high. Perhaps the Matrox Powerdesk / driver is buggy. I flashed its BIOS, but that didn't help. (It's a bit unusual to be able to flash an old video card's BIOS.)

I increased the FSB to 150 and everything worked. However 160 FSB didn't work, so maybe the capacitors are a bit worn out.

retro games 100 wrote:

I'm convinced the onboard Raid controller is making general disk access faster than the onboard IDE controller. Also, I should have been clearer in my posts above: all of my HDDs and Compact Flash devices are comfortably under the 136 GB capacity! That is what's making this situation odd. The CF devices that I have unsuccessfully tried with the onboard IDE are just 2 and 4 GB, and the Western Digital HDD is just 80 GB.

Just to add, often motherboard manufacturers added additional chips to their product (in this case, a motherboard) to give it extra features that the native chipset doesn't have. For instance, some motherboard used a chipset with for instance ATA-66 and added an extra chip which could do ATA-100.
I think that's why your disk access is faster now.

And Swaaye is right, you'll probably need the floppy RAID drivers as theres a good chance XP doesn't have the drivers for the extra controller natively.

But in your case I'd be very glad that you have it. otherwise you'd have a very limited motherboard indeed! 😉

Oops, I'm being a bit scatter-brained at the moment: I am using Win98SE, but I haven't yet installed the High Point RAID controller driver software. Currently, it's marked as a yellow question mark (?) inside the Control Panel -> System devices section. Perhaps that's why the system is behaving a bit oddly? I will look online for the driver tomorrow. This is the first time I've ever used an onboard integrated RAID controller, and so I don't have the software immediately available to install it.

I was unable to download the necessary software from the ftp.epox.com server because it wouldn't accept the user name and password of epoxsupport, and so I used google to get the driver, BIOS file and also Raid management software. The driver installed OK in Win98SE. The Management software also installed OK. There's just one yellow question mark (?) symbol left inside the Control Panel -> System area. It's for something called PCI ISA bus. Perhaps I can just delete it.

The problem I have now is that I tried to flash the High Point controller on the mobo. I restarted the machine and went in to safe DOS prompt mode. I then ran a utility inside the High Point BIOS software package called load.exe. Load is used to flash the High Point controller. I specified the correct BIOS file for the mobo's HPT 370 chip. The message displayed was:

Found adapter at bus 0, device 14

And that is all it does. The cursor blinks on the next line, but nothing happens. Soon, the keyboard / CAPS key stops responding, and I have to hold down the power button for about 4 seconds and then the power is switched off to the PC. I can boot back up again OK, and the Raid is working OK, but the BIOS is not updated. Its version is 2.0.something. (The updated BIOS file is 2.351.)

Why would you want to flash the highpoint? I thought it was the integrated IDE that was troubling you.

Anyway, I found Epox downloads to be a challenge, to put it mildly.
I was looking for some info, manuals and bios stuff for my Epox EP-MVP3G2.
I found it on the main page, browsed all the way to the download link and all links were dead -_-
Their ftp didn't work for me, couldn't connect to it (404 thingy)

I'm having similar problems with Soltek, for my Soltek SL-56D5

The Highpoint BIOS is usually part of the main mobo BIOS when the chip is on a mobo.

swaaye wrote:

The Highpoint BIOS is usually part of the main mobo BIOS when the chip is on a mobo.

Hmmm, never really thought about it. If the bios is hosed, it might as well have hosed the highpoint as well.
I have a somewhat similar problem with a P3 Intel board I once repaired (had a broken socket lever). Turned out the floppy connector was dead but both IDE ports still worked.
Could this be caused by broken traces on the motherboard?
If this is the case then obviously a bios flash isn't gonna help

Regarding access to the Epox FTP server, please use an FTP program rather than a browser. I downloaded Total Commander. It connects OK to the Epox FTP server. I was able to browse to the 8KTA3Pro folder, and get the High Point software.

Regarding the High Point BIOS, yes you must be right. Looking carefully at the software downloaded from the Epox server, there is no seperate BIOS software to upgrade the HPT controller. I think I'm all up to date with this board now. 😀

Regarding the mobo's BIOS - it has been successfully flashed to the final Beta version. It's true that I am still having problems with the IDE port 1, but it could be some kind of hardware fault. Luckily, the UIDE port 1 is working well. During the BIOS POST, the HPT controller displays the word (bla bla)/ATA. The word ATA perhaps is the keyword here, indicating that it's a good IDE substitute.

Edit: I do think the IDE port 1 is defective in some way. I tried plugging in the DVD-ROM reader, and the BIOS POST message info reported this device as "garbage characters" on the screen.

The mobo seems to be behaving itself. I have the High Point driver successfully installed in Win98SE, and I also removed the failed PCI-to-ISA bridge device inside the System / Control Panel section. After rebooting, this device was correctly reinstalled. I think it was called pnpisa.vxd. I ran 3DMark Max 99 using the mobo's default FSB of 133 Mhz, and got these scores with a Matrox G400 16MB card, and a 1667Mhz mobile barton:

6078 3DMarks, 28059 CPU 3DMarks.

I increased the FSB value from 133 to 155 inside the BIOS set up area, and reran 3DMark Max 99:

6047 3DMarks, 32233 CPU 3DMarks.

At last, the "penny has dropped". I finally understand incredibly roughly how graphics cards are limited to what they can do, in terms of processing speed. I have increased the mobo's FSB, which has speeded up the whole system, but the G400 cannot increase its performance accordingly, because it can't supply the data and instructions to its GPU any faster. This is because the RAM (is it SDRAM?) is not quick enough. Also, could it also be a speed limitation of the GPU as well? In other words, this processor can't possibly work any harder? Is this situation known as "bandwidth saturation", or does that only apply to the speed of data flow around the card (ie its memory), rather than the GPU's inability to process data any faster?

I removed the Matrox G400, and replaced it with an nVidia ti4200 manufactured by PNY. I reran the 3DMark 99 Max benchmark program:

133 FSB = 12304 3DMarks, 28031 CPU 3DMarks
155 FSB = 14024 3DMarks, 32656 CPU 3DMarks

So, here we see a difference between the Matrox G400 and the nVidia ti4200. The PNY card is able to produce faster results with the increase in FSB. I guess there's a chance it could go faster and faster, the more the FSB and/or the CPU speed is increased. Incidentally, does anyone know what the MHz speed "cut off" point is for a ti4200? When I say "cut off" point, I mean what is the CPU speed (and/or mobo's FSB speed) that will produce the fastest result for a ti4200? In other words, if you go greater than that "cut off" point, you will not see any increase in the ti4200 benchmark performance.

I think the word your searching for is bottleneck. in the case of the G400, the card it self was the bottleneck. The opposite of the situation would have the processor as the bottleneck. With that geforce, I don't think your going to find the bottleneck with anything you can do with that chipset.

😀