K7D Master - L LAN and IDE controller question

[cccary]

Hi,
Wonder if anyone has had experience with these two issues:

1) Even thought I installed the LAN drivers that came with the K7D I cannot get the LAN to work consistently. When I use an external USB to hook up to my LAN I have no problems, but cannot seem to get the onboard LAN to work consistently. It seems to cut out from time to time.

2) I downloaded and installed the 768, 762 chipset drivers from AMD's website, as well as the master PCI bus controller, but I am having problems accessing my secondary optical drive. Again, sometimes it works and sometimes (mostly) it doesn't. Initially I had the optical drives on the same IDE channel, with one set to master and the other slave. The HDD was on its own channel. Then I changed and put the HDD and one of the opticals on the same channel witht the DVD optical drive on its own. Still no luck.
On a couple of occasions XP gave a message that said there was a I/O error when I tried to access the drive.

Anyone who can help?

Thanks,
Chris

[cmcquistion]

WELCOME TO THE FORUMS!!!

Do you have the latest BIOS?

Are you using the latest drivers for the NIC?

I suspect the Optical drive is at fault and not the motherboard. If the motherboard were at fault, you would be having trouble with all your IDE devices. Since you are only having trouble with one device, no matter what channel, I suspect the device.

The best configuration, by the way, was your first configuration, with the hard drive on its own channel and the two optical drives sharing a channel.

[cccary]

Chris,
Thanks for the reply. I am not sure that I have the latest Bios yet, but I intent to flash to that as soon as possible. My situation there is a little tricky since I do not have a floppy.

I followed your link to the MSI site (in the Step by step article) with all the drivers and downloaded and installed them, so I think I have the latest LAN drivers.

I also thought that the optical drive could be at fault, but I went and exchanged it this weekend and had the same issue with the new optical. Also, I will switch back to my original config with the HDD on its own channel.

Lastly, The two optical drives are 1) Verbatim producer DVD +RW recognised by XP as a NEC drive. 2) I/O Magic CR-R and DVD player combo, recognized by XP as a Samsung. Originally this was a Samsung, which I took back to the store.

[cmcquistion]

Could the problem be with one of your IDE cables? You said you had the same problem on both channels. Were you using the same cable, or a different cable.

Do you have IDE Write prefetch enabled in the BIOS? It is disabled, by default. Don't ask me why. I can't think of any reason to not use it, unless you are running some really old IDE devices.

In the Operating System, in the Device Manager, go to your Primary IDE channel and Secondary IDE channel and set the access mode to "DMA if available" on both the Master and Slave.

[cccary]

Good thinking on the cable! I used the same one. I will switch it our tonight. Also, will try the Bios and device driver fixes.

Thanks!!!