KD7 RAID..working..sort of

Ok, so I wait what seems like an eternity for my replacement caps only to find out that the order didn't go thru, so I had to re-order and wait some more.

The caps finally arrive, and I dutifully replace all nineteen bad caps with quality Rubycon capacitors and proceed to load windows, and get Win2000 installed,and just when it starts to load the desktop I get the bsod and a reboot. OK, I figure I must have done something wrong, so I fdisk/reload win2k and it does the same..and at this time, I'm not thinking clearly and think it may have something to do with the 4n1 drivers, so I mess with that for a while, and it still messes up, so I'm thinking hdd getting ready to fail, so I turn on Smart monitoring capability in BIOS, and run everest and see that the hdd is fine, with no errors....so after playing with Win ME, 2k,98, and XP, I decided to try Linux Mint9 (Isadore) and I imediatley see something I should have done in the 1st place....RUN MEMTEST86+. So I run memtest, and after about the 4th test the mem started showing errors up the wazu..now this is ddr400 single stick, so I shutdown and swap out the single for a pair of ddr266...and when I boot up, the board says ram is ddr333. Well, after some researching, I find out that an athlon with a 333mhz bus onboard, you cannot change the memory clock. Luckily I have an Athlon 2000+ with a default 266 bus, so I slap that pup in, and voila! mem is running at 266...Yay!
So I again attempt to load any version of windows I have and I get similar faults. So, this time I immediately run memtest, and what do you know? that ram is toast too. I only tested both sticks together...I may have one good stick, but running win2k with only 256mb of ram is like hauling a load of bricks in a Yugo...it can be done but it's not much fun.
So the whole tower gets put back in the row of "to do later" computers because I don't have the money to spend on ddr400 ram atm.
So I think the board will be stable when I get some proper ram to use but I think it will be long after the Holidays b4 I can get to it again.
With the cooling I have for this rig, I should be able to get 3200+ speed out of the 2500+
So is the normal problems that AMD'ers have? or do I just get lucky
Anyways I want to thank all who have helped me delve into the World of AMD.
P.S. just because the tower went to the back of the line, doesn't mean that I have given up on AMD...yet

You must just be lucky! Although I've never run systems more than about 4 years old (my sig rig is over that now) I've never had a stick of RAM go out on me.

I think if I were you I'd try to load Windows anyway, even with one small stick. Sure, you may not be able to run the system very well - and I wouldn't try - but it seems like it would be good to know it's not something else besides the RAM that's causing problems ...

Yea, I know it's the ram..I have experienced this kind of errors b4, but just thought it may be unique to the AMD platform...like I said, I wasn't thinking clearly (after 2:00 AM).
So I will just wait till I get a few bucks together, and try to find some BH-5 or other good ddr400. the other Athlon rig I have has sdram and not ddr, but I played a game on it yesterday, and it ran well. The only caveat with this rig is the bios is somewhat corrupted in that it says "unknown flash" and it will not let me flash to a new bios. Maybe I will look online for a new bios chip and see if this board (ECS K7VZA) is clockable. As it stands now,it works and that is all that I care about for the moment.
I might sell this rig and use the funds to get my ddr and maybe if I can get enough for it,I may get Win home server for one of my backup boxes, or win7 for my main rig, and load XP on one of the others.
I never know what I gonna do next, so I might get curious and try the two ddr266 sticks separately and see if one or both are bad, but I won't have much use for ddr266 when I get my ddr400.
I really like this time in history because I can use the latest hardware and compare it to the many Dinosaurs I have, and most of the old school rigs I have are still viable (in their own way).
I have a Q for ya though..Your Opty is a 939?
Been thinking of upgrading my Mom's 939 to a dual core...atm she has a 3800+ (venice)

So I will just wait till I get a few bucks together, and try to find some BH-5 or other good ddr400.

Click to expand...

I think I mentioned this before, but... unless you're planning to play around with other DDR1 systems, don't even bother getting fancy RAM. Any sort of DDR400 value RAM will be more than fine on that KD7, since it'll probably never see anywhere near 400mhz anyway.

DocClock aka MadClocker said:

I have a Q for ya though..Your Opty is a 939?
Been thinking of upgrading my Mom's 939 to a dual core...atm she has a 3800+ (venice)

Click to expand...

Yep! All the Opty 1xx are s939 and the dual-cores start at 165 @ 1.8 GHz stock and go up to 185 @ 2.6 GHz stock. Most will clock up to 2.7 GHz fairly easy and some will clock into the 3.0 GHz range with some work and good cooling. Oddly enough my two 165's will clock higher (a hair over 2.9 GHz) than the 180 in my sig - but it takes one heck of a clock to get those 165's going that fast! The A8N32's will do it, though.


PS
If you find an Opty you might want to buy see if you can get the stepping from it (that the week/year it was made). The K8i's have some very good weeks and some very poor weeks so the stepping makes a big difference with them. The stepping is in the middle of the second row of text on the CPU and should read something like CCBBE 0610DPMW. The 0610's were great OC'ers as were most of the 07xx Opty's ...

Yea, If I understand AMD codes correctly, your opty example is from 2006 week 10?

I think I found some cheap ram...can the KT400 chipset handle high density ram?
If so, I can get 4x256mb sticks of cas3 ddr400 for $18.00US which would be enough to run Win2K.
I still love Win2K...it is still an almost flawless OS with a very good network stack and never a crash unless you push your hardware too far, and it plays most of the retro games I like.

can the KT400 chipset handle high density ram?

Click to expand...

Yeah, most Via chipsets can.

Running 4 sticks is going to be a bit iffy, though you should be able to get away with the 4 256MB high-density sticks since they're probably single-bank... that chipset tends to have trouble with more than 4 banks of memory installed. (And don't expect to run a 400mhz memory clock with that many DIMMs, but running it synchronously at 333mhz is generally a better idea anyway.)

Yep, After looking further into my manual, it says that you can pnly populate two slots with ddr333 or ddr400, so I'll have to rethink how much ram I can stuff into this rig...looks like 2gigs is max for this one

Well, I think the 'two slots' thing is assuming dual-bank DIMMs.

The practical limits on that chipset seem to be: 2 banks at 400mhz, 4 banks at 333mhz, 6 banks at 266mhz. So at 333mhz, you should be able to do any combination that keeps you at 4 banks or less... two dual bank DIMMs, four single bank, or one dual bank and two single bank.

I suppose it's possible that the board also has a BIOS lockout that looks at the number of DIMMS, but Gigabyte boards are historically pretty flexible, so I would kinda doubt it.

Well, this project is turning out to be the mainboard from 7734. I tried every stick of ddr I have, and every time, it failed at the same place in Memtest86+, and the ram that I ordered was supposed to be pretested (I paid for that).

And some of the other ram was good when it came out of another system that I upgraded, and they let me keep the old ram..so the next logical thought was that the board is still not quite right, and in the Memory thread, GT240 suggested that I look for a post that didn't get nipped when I replaced some caps, and while getting ready to rip out the board, I noticed that there was a cap that I missed between a couple PCI slots, and after removing the board, I did indeed have a post that was just a bit longer than all the rest, so I nipped it, and now need to replace one more cap. That brings the total to twenty.
While it is interesting to do all this rebuilding, it is starting to put a bad taste in me concerning AMD boards...I know it's not the fault of the platform, it's just my luck.

The only other Athlon board I have only has a KT133a chipset, and only takes sdram and the max proc you can use is a 2000+ and the board has no clocking features.
I'm starting to loose my enthusiasm for this build.
So far this "free" board has cost around $50.00 in parts, and hours & hours of labor.
If the replacement cap doesn't fix the instability, I may just have to shoot it and put it out of my misery.
So when you get a bit frustrated that your board won't quite go to that magical height, just remember this thread, and you won't feel so bad.

Well, I now know that a 1000uF-6.3v capacitor will not work in a hole that needs 1000uF-10v....the board will not even post. so now I have to order another cap and wait another week to see if this project will fly.
After this, if it doesn't want to work, I think I will put the board on a clay pigeon launcher and give the time tested word "PULL!"...and the next sound you should hear is BOOM!