Abit Highpoint controller problems

I am trying to upgrade my system from a Soyo SY-6BA+III Pentium motherboard to an Abit KR7A Socket A motherboard by moving my hard drive (Western Digital 40Gb, ATA100) to the new Abit. Windows 98 will no longer boot, except in Safe Mode. I can't even run Drive Image from floppy without it crashing with errors! I need to be able to clone data from drive to drive when I upgrade so I have since gone back to the Soyo Pentium board until I get this issue worked out. It's old but it WORKS.

I read in the Abit FAQs on the KR7A motherboard that I need to install the Abit HPT drivers in order for my old hard drive to work on my new motherboard. What is the correct way to install these drivers when moving my drive from the old motherboard to the Abit? Should I install them first, before I move the drive, or do it afterward from Safe Mode IF I can even get that to start? But again, I have to be able to run utility progs from floppy as well so...am I screwed or what?

I have serious reservations about trusting my data to this motherboard after having so much difficulty just getting it to recognize my drive. This seems to be the same problem I had two years ago when I tried to get Highpoint drivers working on another Soyo motherboard, an SY-6BA+IV. Any drive formatted on the Highpoint would NOT work at all on a standard IDE controller. This is completely unacceptable. I have too much data that has to be moved and/or cloned periodically and can't be dealing with this kind of garbage.

Any recommendations on a different AMD XP motherboard? Are they ANY currently made which do not require proprietary drivers to make IDE drives compatible? It's hard to determine this from most of the reviews I read. I like the overclocking capabilities of Soyo and Abit but if I have to choose I'll choose a plain vanilla board as long as it's rock solid and requires no special babysitting.

You're puting the boot drive from one computer (with that computer's drivers and software) and expecting it to run the new board flawless? Not gonna happen, except in safe mode without the old drivers loaded. You're trying to start a computer using information files that are talking hardware that isn't there.

If you're just transfering drives, transfer your data to cd or a secondary drive using the old computer, and format the drive that's gonna be the boot drive in the new one. The new system needs a clean drive to start with. You can load the highpoint drivers after you reinstall the OS on the fresh drive.
If you're gonna run it with raid, you need to set it up in bios, and raid bios, before you even get to loading an OS.


I've tried using a promise system, and really didn't care for it. I've been using highpoints and won't switch until Abit becomes too impossible to deal with (not too long now).

if you have a CD-RW you can run a backup utility

I removed all my drivers from Windows before booting in the new system but it still crashed. I'll try it one more time into safe mode then try the Abit drivers. I thought I had a hardware problem before so I never got that far.

If I do a completely clean installation I will have to reinstall all my apps. That will take weeks. I need to preserve my boot partition with Win98 and my registry so all the apps don't vanish. Doing a backup to CD will only transfer the same file image that was on the old drive to the new drive won't it? Do I need a different backup program? I've been using Drive Image. I haven't tried MS Backup yet.

And how do I run anything reliably, like Partition Magic, from a DOS floppy? Is there an Abit DOS driver for the Highpoint? I have 6 partitions and I need to use PM for the flexibility.

What everyone is saying is perform a backup of your existing partiton/ with Os and apps on your old system onto a Cd, set up your new board and format your drives after setting up the raid, then use the Backup Cd to reinstall the old partiton/ Os and apps, Like Diggrr says you first must setup the raid, then install onto the freshly formatted drive array.

"What everyone is saying is perform a backup of your existing partiton/ with Os and apps on your old system onto a Cd, set up your new board and format your drives after setting up the raid, then use the Backup Cd to reinstall the old partiton/ Os and apps, Like Diggrr says you first must setup the raid, then install onto the freshly formatted drive array."


I realize what they're saying about the backup. I just wasn't sure if it would work with Drive Image since I assumed it would just duplicate the old format and cause a lockup regardless of what drivers I had installed. I'll try it that way.

I did find another problem with this system - bad memory module! I ran Memtest and got close to 400,000 errors on test 5. I lowered the memory bus speed to 100Mhz and it reduced the errors to about 80. I sent it back for exchange today. That could account for a lot of problems I was having, in addition to not using the Highpoint drivers.