Strange BIOSTAR motherboard behavior

[kevinroyalty]

Need some input to a wierd problem I'm having with an existing Biostar M7NCD Pro board. Here's the background:

Working config for the past 14 months:
It has an AMD Anthlon XP 2600+ CPU installed. It also has 2 512MB DDR333 SDRAM modules installed in dual channel mode. GeForce 3 AGP video card installed. A Samsung 40x CDRW drive (2nd IDE, Master), a 12x DVD-ROM (2nd IDE, Slave), a 100GB Maxtor ATA133 IDE drive (1st IDE, Master), onboard sound enabled, onboard lan enabled, all 6 USB2 ports enabled. serial enabled, parallel enabled. No floppy drive ever in this system. Enermax 400W PS. XP Pro as the OS, no issues.

Current config:
I recently purchased a new SB Audigy 2 ZS sound card, and a WD 200GB EIDE HD and wanted to start my XP fresh, so I powered down, unplugged, and installed the SB card in the 2nd PCI slot from the top, and swapped HD drives. Powered up, flashed the BIOS with the latest code from Biostar website (bios date 3/11/04), disabled the onboard audio and serial ports. There are no release notes available for the latest BIOS that I can locate, so I'm not 100% sure of the >137GB drive support being in this latest BIOS rev.

Symptoms:
- Unusually long POST times, even with quickboot enabled
- If I install XP fresh, after I get it installed, if I reboot, the system doesn't see any OS on the drive and asks for a system disk on reboot.
- To install XP, the system takes 5 minutes to even show the text mode install screen when I boot from the CD.

I've tried disabling the DVD-ROM to see if it was an issue - no change to the symptoms.

Suggestions would be nice. Thanks for reading.


Sincerely,
Kevin Royalty, MCSE
Principal Consultant
Solution Net Inc

 

[pat]

You may try to remove the master/slave jumper on your new HD completely. some WD HDD need the jumper to be removed.

-Always put the blame on you first, then on the hardware !!!

 

[kevinroyalty]

Just removed the jumper as you suggested. The POST flew by, and the PC is booting from the HD (part of the XP install at this point). I'll let you know if this is the final solution after the first reboot after XP install is finished.

Never had to remove the jumper before - wierd!

Kevin

Sincerely,
Kevin Royalty, MCSE
Principal Consultant
Solution Net Inc

 

[Crashman]

WD has for years used 2 different settings for Master (with slave attached) and Single (no slave). The Single setting has for years used "no jumper" but you'll often get the drive with the jumper across a couple ground pins, where it does nothing (the same as having "no jumper").

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

 

[kevinroyalty]

I've been using Maxtor for a few years now, and was suprised that having the jumper on master no slave acted that way. The system is up and running fine now - thanks for the help!

Kevin

Sincerely,
Kevin Royalty, MCSE
Principal Consultant
Solution Net Inc