CougTek
Hairy Aussie
I bought a motherboard on e-Bay on September of last year that I thought to be an ECS K7S5A. The board I received was in fact a PC Chips M830L, which the seller assured me that it was an exact replica of the ECS K7S5A. Problem is : there was always an error at bootup about a bad CMOS size. I tried to reset the CMOS, to re-flash it, to move the RAM (tried every sockets, both SDRAM and DDR). Nothing. As the seller was an incompetent jerk, it became obvious that it would be too much trouble to try to return the motherboard and get a refund. So I put it back in its box and let it sleep until this week.
My second Win2K Pro box running on a T-Bird 800MHz/Asus A7V platform always hung when I tried to install the 4in1 driver from VIA. The last version I tried was the 4.37 I think. So I left it without an appropriate driver for a while, using Windows' default drivers. It was running fine for its purpose (F@H crunching), but I hate to have an uncomplete installation and therefore, after a few months of respite, I decided to retry the latest and hopefully fixed 4.43 4in1 driver. Same result. Fortunately, I had no hammer or other blunt weapon in that room when Winblows hung during bootup that day (tuesday I think). I took a few days to calm myself and I remembered the PC Chips board that was accumulating dust in its corner. I though : "Why not give it a shot once again?".
I remember I thought the CMOS error might have been caused by a dying battery back then, but since I had no spare CMOS battery lying around, I didn't try to swap the one that came with the board. So I bought a new 3V battery and replaced the old one. I switched all the parts that were on the Asus A7V (Adaptec 39160, Adaptec Single 64 NIC, ATI Rage 2C 4MB PCI, Thunderbird 800MHz surmounted by a Thermaltake Volcano 7 and also 256MB of PC133 SDRAM).
First bootup trial : same random ASCII characters show as before. The last BIOS I installed was the one for the ECS K7S5A dated from the 20th Sep. '01. I also remebered my SCSI adapter's BIOS made the situation worst (I could bootup one tenth of the time when I used an IDE drive and unpluggued the SCSI controller), but since I no longer have a spare IDE drive, I had to find a way to make it work anyway. I went on ECS' website and surprise surprise, there had been quite a lot of updates for that motherboard since the last one I used (that was already not the first version either). I downloaded the revision of June 26th and made a bootdisk with it.
I removed the SCSI controller from the K7S5A, leaving no other boot devices than the floppy and the (empty) CD-ROM. Eventually made it to the a: and launched the AMI flashing utility. I wasn't sure it would work as there are several board revisions for the K7S5A and the one I had wasn't even manufactured under the ECS brand. There could have been some differences (apart from the PCB color) between the PC Chips and the ECS. Apparently not since the flashing process went without a problem.
Rebooted, pressed Del to go to the BIOS settings and "tada!", the BIOS looked ok. Previously, I was only able to view half the characters because it was corrupted in some way. But then it was a perfectly normal BIOS setup screen I had in front of me. Loaded default settings, exited and rebooted. Powered off the system, pluggued in the Adaptec 39160 and fired it up once again. Everything went fine...well almost. USB doesn't work, but I'll figure it out later on. Anyway, my once non-fonctional Windows 2K worked just fine on the reborn K7S5A. I plan to re-install Windows once my current F@H unit will be completed (around 12:20am tonight according to my estimates).
So it turned out that my formerly considered piece of crap was only suffering from a dying CMOS chip. This is IMO the most plausible cause of its past bad behavior, since there were no mentioned issue between the Adaptec 39160 and my K7S5A. It's almost like having a "free" motherboard. I had to work for it, but still, success is sweet enough to make it worth. Would I wanted to be sarcastic (I do
), I would say that ECS worked where Asus didn't. The Asus isn't dead. It will just replace the PC Chips in the box accumulating dust in the corner of my computer room for a while, until a) the PC Chips board piss me off or b) I find something to plug into it to add to my crunching farm.
I'm probably one of the few, if not the only, freak on Earth with two 64bit PCI cards pluggued into such an utterly budget-oriented board as the K7S5A, PC Chips flavor to add even more).
My second Win2K Pro box running on a T-Bird 800MHz/Asus A7V platform always hung when I tried to install the 4in1 driver from VIA. The last version I tried was the 4.37 I think. So I left it without an appropriate driver for a while, using Windows' default drivers. It was running fine for its purpose (F@H crunching), but I hate to have an uncomplete installation and therefore, after a few months of respite, I decided to retry the latest and hopefully fixed 4.43 4in1 driver. Same result. Fortunately, I had no hammer or other blunt weapon in that room when Winblows hung during bootup that day (tuesday I think). I took a few days to calm myself and I remembered the PC Chips board that was accumulating dust in its corner. I though : "Why not give it a shot once again?".
I remember I thought the CMOS error might have been caused by a dying battery back then, but since I had no spare CMOS battery lying around, I didn't try to swap the one that came with the board. So I bought a new 3V battery and replaced the old one. I switched all the parts that were on the Asus A7V (Adaptec 39160, Adaptec Single 64 NIC, ATI Rage 2C 4MB PCI, Thunderbird 800MHz surmounted by a Thermaltake Volcano 7 and also 256MB of PC133 SDRAM).
First bootup trial : same random ASCII characters show as before. The last BIOS I installed was the one for the ECS K7S5A dated from the 20th Sep. '01. I also remebered my SCSI adapter's BIOS made the situation worst (I could bootup one tenth of the time when I used an IDE drive and unpluggued the SCSI controller), but since I no longer have a spare IDE drive, I had to find a way to make it work anyway. I went on ECS' website and surprise surprise, there had been quite a lot of updates for that motherboard since the last one I used (that was already not the first version either). I downloaded the revision of June 26th and made a bootdisk with it.
I removed the SCSI controller from the K7S5A, leaving no other boot devices than the floppy and the (empty) CD-ROM. Eventually made it to the a: and launched the AMI flashing utility. I wasn't sure it would work as there are several board revisions for the K7S5A and the one I had wasn't even manufactured under the ECS brand. There could have been some differences (apart from the PCB color) between the PC Chips and the ECS. Apparently not since the flashing process went without a problem.
Rebooted, pressed Del to go to the BIOS settings and "tada!", the BIOS looked ok. Previously, I was only able to view half the characters because it was corrupted in some way. But then it was a perfectly normal BIOS setup screen I had in front of me. Loaded default settings, exited and rebooted. Powered off the system, pluggued in the Adaptec 39160 and fired it up once again. Everything went fine...well almost. USB doesn't work, but I'll figure it out later on. Anyway, my once non-fonctional Windows 2K worked just fine on the reborn K7S5A. I plan to re-install Windows once my current F@H unit will be completed (around 12:20am tonight according to my estimates).
So it turned out that my formerly considered piece of crap was only suffering from a dying CMOS chip. This is IMO the most plausible cause of its past bad behavior, since there were no mentioned issue between the Adaptec 39160 and my K7S5A. It's almost like having a "free" motherboard. I had to work for it, but still, success is sweet enough to make it worth. Would I wanted to be sarcastic (I do
), I would say that ECS worked where Asus didn't. The Asus isn't dead. It will just replace the PC Chips in the box accumulating dust in the corner of my computer room for a while, until a) the PC Chips board piss me off or b) I find something to plug into it to add to my crunching farm.I'm probably one of the few, if not the only, freak on Earth with two 64bit PCI cards pluggued into such an utterly budget-oriented board as the K7S5A, PC Chips flavor to add even more).
