Old-school advise required - socket a

[tazman171]

If you can sell them I would upgrade, those boards were notorious for the issues you just had, especially the caps on them bulging and failing. They were quite the system though back in their day.

You can really step up though for not much money, that Gigabyte board I was telling you about is just a baseline, for $10 or $20 more you can get the AMD 890 chipset with onboard GPU, usb 3.0 + 2.0, external eSATA, etc, etc. Really good solutions.

 

[Dr. McCoy]

First bit of good news folks Did a bios hot swap and reflashed the old chip - now got my old board booting again )

I have just been reading about similar (actually pretty much identical) situations with Abit NF7 users and a discussion about merging Bios files together - one person suggested that you should use an earlier version of the 3112 OEM Sata drivers so I am thinking that a compatibility issue might have been the root of my problems, leading to a corrupt bios...
However, Now I have two working motherboards worth up to £50 each (especially with new capacitors!) and XP2400+ / 2600 with a video card worth at least £30, and 1gb ram, so I am very tempted to go down the route of selling them and opting for a complete system upgrade now.... Christmas might be coming early for me this year

Note that the A7N8X is prone to experience what's known as "Death Sleep". The board won't do anything when it happens but sometimes if you remove all periphials, it will wake up again. They will also wake up some of the time if removed from the case, the CMOS battery removed as well, then allowed to sit somewhere for awhile.

One of my A7N's did just that - Woudn't do a thing but after setting back into it's box for about six months, reinstalled it and it went back to working again as if nothing had happened. I don't recall a specific cause of the problem and as far as I know, it's only known to affect the A7N8X's.

 

[tazman171]

Note that the A7N8X is prone to experience what's known as "Death Sleep". The board won't do anything when it happens but sometimes if you remove all periphials, it will wake up again. They will also wake up some of the time if removed from the case, the CMOS battery removed as well, then allowed to sit somewhere for awhile.

One of my A7N's did just that - Woudn't do a thing but after setting back into it's box for about six months, reinstalled it and it went back to working again as if nothing had happened. I don't recall a specific cause of the problem and as far as I know, it's only known to affect the A7N8X's.

There might be hope then for my board that "died" when in my buddies case. I know it's just an A7N8X, but it was a complete system that always stood in as a backup.

 

[Dr. McCoy]

There might be hope then for my board that "died" when in my buddies case. I know it's just an A7N8X, but it was a complete system that always stood in as a backup.

It depends on the variant whether it's "Just" an A7N or not. Some of these boards with the right setup can do some good numbers - And here's proof of that. It's a run I did sometime ago with mine.

 

[ollyk]

ok folks here is an update so far. I tried the merged bios i.e. v1008 from abit merged using cbrom with 4250 raid bios from SIL. System got to verfiying pool data but came up with a read error so would not boot. I then tried the last Sil3112 bios update and same problem. Interesting that booting off a IDE drive windows could see my sata drive and other windows install but just wouldn't do the pool data thing - reading on I believe this is a BIOS > hard drive communication issue and not software related (I tried repairing windows to no avail).
Anyway, so I have just merged version 4284? with 1008 and my sata boots straight away - for various reasons I am now reinstalling windows xp and everything is working as before - I got the unsigned driver error again from my original asus sil windows drivers, but using the latest signed drivers from sil (that go with the 84 bios update) windows does not see a sata hard drive at all!
Looks like I am stuck with a setup that works but potentially ends up with data write errors as described above and possibly a corrupt bios. Oh well, there was obviously a reason Asus didn't give us these updates - I suspect it must be hardware related!?!
Thanks for everyones help. I will keep the mobos for another month or so and see what happens, but I think I will go the update route!
Will update if anything changes, I would still like to hear from anyone else who has had similar experiences though

Olly.

 

[ollyk]

It depends on the variant whether it's "Just" an A7N or not. Some of these boards with the right setup can do some good numbers - And here's proof of that. It's a run I did sometime ago with mine.

Nice

 

[RJARRRPCGP]

Hey folks ok after many years of service my A7N8X has just died.
Now a few months on I start getting delayed write fails, things got worse then no boot - now my graphics card POSTS and I get a beep but things do not get as far as a memory test. So my mobo has finally died - perhaps due to a corrupt BIOS?

Did you check the caps? They are likely visibly bad, if they are bad.

Also, check the PSU caps! You may have an Antec with bad Fuhjyyu caps.