P4C800-E Deluxe mouse and SATA problem

[kanenas]

Hello.
Maybe somebody has come across and can suggest a solution to the
following:

I've replaced a burned Intel mobo with an Asus P4C800-E Deluxe one, a
3.2 P4 and 1G Kingston memory in a box with a 450W suply.
I've also replaced my old GF4 Asus with a new one (Asus 5950 Ultra).
I transferred the CD drives and my old Western Digital disks
(connected to a Promise controller) into the new system and added a
160GB WD SATA (conected to the motherboard).
The configuration now is:

Primary IDE master: LG multi DVD drive
Primary IDE slave: not connected
Secondary IDE master: Samsung DVD-ROM SD-616F
Secondary IDE slave: Teac CD writer
Third IDE master: WD SATA 160
no other connections.

On a Promise card Ultra 133TX2 there are 3 WD hard disks.
D0 is primary and boot, D1 and D2 are extended partitions.

The new 160GB SATA is also formatted as an extended partition and is
currently completely empty.

Using BIOS defaults, or setting the system to IDE instead of RAID
(which is not), or disabling the raid controler, or updating to BIOS
1016, gives the exact same problems.

1) On the times I manage to boot into XP SP1, the PS2 mouse is frozen.
Changing mice makes no difference. A USB mouse works fine.

2) On the BIOS post, 99% of the times, the Samsung CD ROM does not
show as secondary IDE master (shows as not connected). When I click on
it, it finds it fine so it shows on the main BIOS page. But, it
disappears on the next boot.

3) Again on BIOS post, the SATA is most of the times invisible. A few
reboots later, it appears. When it does, it is set as a boot device
overriding the drive D0 that I had set up, so I have to redo that part
and hope it will see the SATA on the reboot.

All in all, a veritable mess.

So what do I do?

Do I have a lemon of a mobo? Is it some configuration trick that I
miss? Is it a conflict with my Promise Ultra 1133TX2? If so, how else
can I connect all these devices and make sure they work? (The reason
for that Promise controller was to manage my disks so I could use the
onboard IDE for the CDs. Managing the CDs with the controler instead,
wouldn't work. The CD writers wouldn't operate at their full speed.)

Any suggestions? (other than doing a fresh install of XP which I'm not
about to do and would rather throw out the Asus).

Thanks in advance for any help.

 

[Thomas A. Horsley]

Not a lot of help here, but I have seen other folks who have discovered
that XP does not deal well with swapping motherboards out from under
it. I have seen references to some fix you can get that will force
XP to essentially start from scratch and rescan all the hardward, but
unfortunately do not remember any of the details of that fix, perhaps
some web searches would turn it up?

 

[Tom R]

Not a lot of help here, but I have seen other folks who have discovered
that XP does not deal well with swapping motherboards out from under
it. I have seen references to some fix you can get that will force
XP to essentially start from scratch and rescan all the hardward, but
unfortunately do not remember any of the details of that fix, perhaps
some web searches would turn it up?

Is this the site you were thinking about?
http://michaelstevenstech.com/moving_xp.html

HTH,
Tom

 

[Thomas A. Horsley]

Is this the site you were thinking about?

http://michaelstevenstech.com/moving_xp.html

I don't really remember, though it certainly looks similar, but I could
swear I've seen something once about getting XP to rescan all the hardware
without the full repair install.

I guess the main reason I don't remember much is that I always look
on a motherboard swap as a good opportunity to clean out all the
old junk an reinstall from scratch .
--email: (e-mail address removed) icbm: Delray Beach, FL |
<URL:http://home.att.net/~Tom.Horsley> Free Software and Politics <<==+

 

[Anon]

If I'm reading your post correctly, you have two Ultra133 HDDs connected to
a PCI Promise controller. There might be a conflict here. You don't need the
PCI Promise controller, remove it and connect your two Ultra133 HDDs to the
onboard Promise controller. Make sure the onboard Promise controller
Operating Mode is set to IDE. This will eliminate the possibility of a
conflict from the PCI controller. Make sure you check the jumpers on all
HDDs and CDD/DVDs.

If the system still don't work correctly, post your new configuration, we
may be of further help.

 

[kanenas]

Thank you all for the responses.
The only problem fixed as of now is the one with the invisible Samsung
CD.
I put on the primary IDE cable the Teac CD writer and the LG Multi DVD
(as primary and slave respectively) and on the secondary IDE the
Samsung CD as a master.
It worked that way even though I don't know why it had a conflict
before.

The PS2 mouse is still dead.
I removed the mouse entry from Windows, shut down, plugged the PS2
mouse in, rebooted. Windows creates an entry for a PS2 mouse that
shows no errors but the mouse is frozen. It looks like an IRQ conflict
but nothing is flagged with any warnings. Probably an IRQ share
problem but how. The PS2 mouse shows as using ISA IRQ 12 and is the
only device using this. Is the Asus sharing IRQ 12 behind the scene?

The SATA remains unrecognized during the last few reboots and makes a
clicking noise now and then. If the clicking starts while I'm doing
something on the Windows screen, it even corrupts the display and I
have to reboot.

On the Promise card I have three WD hard disks. The first contains my
boot partition and an extended one and the others are only extended
partitions.

On the motherboard I have the SATA as an extended partition (on Intel
SATA1 connector) and the three CD drives on the normal IDE channels.

In the BIOS I have disabled the Promise SATA controller (I don't even
use its connectors) and the AC'97 audio (I have an Audigy). The IDE
configuration is set to enhanced on SATA (I've tried too SATA+PATA).

The only other card in the system is a 4-port firewire (800 speed).

The above configuration was picked and dropped from the old system to
the new. No problems with the old hardware (except the mouse now).

Thanks again for the help.

 

[Anon]

If I were you, I would get down to basics. Remove all PCI cards, FDD and
HDDs. Connect the HDD with your boot partition to the onboard primary
controller. Make sure it is jumpered as a single drive master. Reset the
BIOS to default. If it still don't recognize the drive and boot, don't
discount the possibility of a memory problem. Add the FDD and run memtest86.

If it still don't work, I would call the vender and tell them you have a bad
MB.

 

[kanenas]

I'll be trying that tonight in case it's an IRQ share problem.
No problem with booting into XP though. It's just that the SATA (empty
disk for now) is not recognized.

 

[kanenas]

The latest is the misandentures:

I removed the SATA disk. Even disconnected from the motherboard and
just connected to a power plug, it was making a clicking noise now and
then. I'm waiting for a replacement now.

The PS2 mouse is still visible but frozen in Windows.
Booting in MSDOS and using some mouse-controlled DOS program
(Edit.com) the mouse behaves nicely. Something wrong with the XP
driver then or a conflict.

The ocassional screen freeze I had attributed to the misbehaving SATA
drive seems to have been a wrong assumption.

The screen still gets corrupted quite frequently. Running 3DMark03
corrupts it in a couple of seconds.
This happens with any NVidia driver I tried including the latest from
Asus's site as well as the 5-day old from NVidia.
It doesn't happen when I uninstall the Forceware drivers and use it in
plain vanilla mode (but then I can't verify with 3DMark03 since it
doesn't run without the drivers being there).

Any idea why is that? The card is an Asus V9980 Ultra with 256MB RAM
on it.
It looks like a memory or timing problem on the card but how to verify
it?
The system memory seems to be fine by the way. I've run the MemTest on
it overnight and had no errors.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

 

[Noozer]

The latest is the misandentures:

I removed the SATA disk. Even disconnected from the motherboard and
just connected to a power plug, it was making a clicking noise now and
then. I'm waiting for a replacement now.

The PS2 mouse is still visible but frozen in Windows.
Booting in MSDOS and using some mouse-controlled DOS program
(Edit.com) the mouse behaves nicely. Something wrong with the XP
driver then or a conflict.

The ocassional screen freeze I had attributed to the misbehaving SATA
drive seems to have been a wrong assumption.

<snip>

If you aren't willing to do a fresh install of XP, then how can you expect
to troubleshoot all these issues? (I may have missed it, but you originally
said you were still running the Intel Mainboard install of XP).

If you have all these HDD's around, format one and put XP on it. Bet it
works just fine.

 

[kanenas]

Well, the main reason is that I have installed hundreds of programs
and don't feel like reinstalling them again.
After all it's only the mouse that misbehaves in Windows and worse
comes to worst, I'll use a USB mouse on the side.
The graphics card problem is card-specific. Either its hardware is bad
or it doesn't like the motherboard.
The SATA problem occurs at the BIOS level and nothing to do with
Windows.
On top of that, why bother calling it "troubleshooting" if some
configuration needs a naked system to test it on? That's not
troubleshooting but it's probably what companies do when they release
something that the users have to actually fight with.
And where's the fun in learning if I keep reformatting my system
everytime something happens?
Take care.

 

[kanenas]

An update on the status of my system's problems:

The WD SATA drive was bad after all. It was replaced and the new one
is being recognized right away.
The Asus V9980 went back to the dealer and I should have a replacement
in a day or two. Most probably bad memory on the card. I'm using an
FX5200 for now.
The PS2 mouse is still in a coma. Windows and various tools identify
it fine but it remains frozen. Using a USB mouse now.
I tried to update my WinXP (updated to SP1) with an XP SP1 CD.
It prepaped the files for updating but when it rebooted and tried to
install it claimed that disk C: (where the original \Windows is) was
corrupted.
Any tool I run against the drive didn't find any errors.
The only problem I see that could explain this behaviour is an error
in the Event Log that seems to have been there months before I
replaced the motherboard.
It's an information message by WinLogon (in the Application Log):
******
Event ID: 1001
Checking file system on C:
The type of the file system is FAT32.
One of the disks needs to be checked, etc
Windows will now check the disk.
Volume serial number is 6088-4794
The specified disk appears to be a non-Windows XP disk.
Do you want to continue? (Y/N) No
******
What on earth is a non-WIndows XP disk?
It looks like some partition information is corrupted but how come no
tool can identify it or correct it?
How to try and fix that?

Here's some info that might be useful for some of you sometime.
After this failed XP update, I resetted the Boot.ini to what it was
before so I didn't have to select between XP and its Update on the
boot menu.
Nevertheless the system remained in a state of Update In Progress.
That caused my display driver not to start. I had the high-res but the
NVidia driver wouldn't load so display was pretty slow.
The fix was to take the system out of this state.
In HKLM\System\Setup set SystemSetupInProgress and UpgradeInProgress
to 0 and reboot.

Take care all.