On Wed, 7 Jan 2004 23:16:36 -0700, "Ken Fox"
wrote:

Hi,

apologies for the length in advance

Yesterday I put a new 160GB SATA drive into my P4P800 Deluxe system, using
it in 2 partitions to replace a 120GB EIDE drive. The idea was to speed up
performance by using the 150MHz drive instead of a drive that was being
limited at 100MHz by the Intel controller chip, plus to get more space.
~30GB are used for a Win2K system partition and the rest for video files,
mostly tv programs from my Wintek DVR card.

I ghosted the contents of the old drive onto the new partition and
surprisingly it all worked, and W2K somehow managed to mend itself even
though it was booting from a different hard disk given a different # by the
bios.

I ran Sandra testing and found that the drive was only running at UDMA-5
(133MHz) speeds; the report recommended updating the bios if possible, among
other things. I reran the test on several different boots and got the same
results. So I went over to the Asus site and read the readme on the newest
bios 1014 for this board and saw that one of the things supposidly fixed was
disk access speeds. I had seen some posts here reporting problems with this
bios but others seemed happy with it so I figured it was reversible and
worth a shot.

I applied the bios using Asusupdate but with the bios on a diskette, not
over the internet. All seemed well, however disk score did not improve in
Sandra despite numerous attempts to tinker with the bios settings. I just
figured that this was a problem not worth dealing with and forgot it.
System performance was otherwise great.

Later today I received a new 120GB IDE drive from a rebate promotion found
on a "deals" type internet site (basically 100 CDRs in a cakebox plus the WD
120GB drive for about $35 after rebates -- who could pass THAT up????). I
took this drive and put it into an external USB 2.0 enclosure, and turned it
on and connected it to a USB 2.0 port where it was immediately recognized.
I proceeded to format this drive, which went fine, then about an hour or two
later I came back to it and copied some files from my in-box data and
pictures directories onto the new USB drive. After a couple of directories
(I copied quite a few), it became obvious that it was taking way too long,
like 20 seconds, for the dialog box to appear when I right clicked on a
drive or directory. This got steadily worse. Whenever I clicked on a
desktop icon it took, similarly, 20 or even 30+ seconds to get a response.
This got old really fast!

At first I thought my new ATA drive was about to bite the dust or that there
was a problem with the W2K ghosted install or that the drive had become
corrupted, so, being as I had ghosted the drive earlier today I ran Norton
Ghost and put the image back on the boot partition. This went fine but
there was no change in this problem. Then I figured, it must be the drive,
so I took the previous drive and put it back in the box, disconnected the
new SATA drive, and reinserted the old, unchanged drive in its former
position on the IDE chain, then rebooted. Problems continued, no change.
Then, I took a ghosted copy of the IDE drive from a couple of weeks ago and
put that on the IDE drive -- no change, same problem. So by this point I
figured there was either some sort of hardware problem or bios problem.

I flashed the bios with afudos.exe with bios 1012; no improvement. Then,
taking a hint from an earlier post on this ng, I reflashed the bios with the
earliest bios I could find (the one on the CDROM that came with the mobo,
using the afudos version from that cdrom), then I reflashed with 1012.

All of the bios flashes appeared to go without incident and no problems were
reported by afudos.

However, and this is a huge however, the system remains all screwed
up!!!!!!!!!!!!! Every time I try to get into the contents of a drive, I get
this 30 or second delay, yet W2K control panel shows no problems and the
bios shows no problem recognizing any of the devices.

SO: I am at wits end about what to do; nothing has worked. 1014 seemed to
work ok for a while but then a few hours later after I had it format a new
USB drive, I got the afforementioned disk access problems and they have not
gone away in spite of multiple bios flashes. The bios does however seem to
work, it shows up and has the usual options on hitting "del" on rebooting.

I should mention that I previously had another IDE drive in the same
external enclosure attached to the system, just that it was 80gb not 120gb,
so the system was "used" to having a USB drive attached to it.

I can't think of anything else to do. Maybe the best thing to do is to
short the jumpers on the CMOS as I've read about here before, but I've never
done that and I'm not sure that is the right thing to do at this juncture.
If you think it is, please give me failsafe instructions since I have a
tendency to take situtations like this and turn them into dumpster runs for
a system :-)

Thanks for all suggestions and I apologize if this problem has been
addressed before; I just don't have the ability to use the system the way I
would like, and my notebook is having problems as well so I haven't tried
using that as a spare.

rgds,

ken
p.s. I turned off all overclocking features when these problems first
occurred and they remain OFF.



Ken,

Consider the possibility that this may not be a BIOS or HD problem.

The delays may be NIC card related. See if they go away after booting
into safe mode with no network drivers.

Good Luck!

---Alex