Recurrent data corruption.

[Paddy]

My father has an Asrock AM2NF3-VSTA with an AMD 3200 CPU, 2x512MB RAM, ATI 8500 AIW and various IDE and SATA drives. His needs are modest.

The motherboard has been very flaky since it was purchased around a year ago. Vista seems to stress it more than XP and it will frequently crash resulting in large amounts of corrupted data. None of this is apparent until you try to access a file that was previously working.

He has run memtest and everything checks out. Asus have releaed 13 BIOS revisions in the last year so there is clearly something wrong. This is also Os independent, although most repeatable in vista. We've reached the point where we've lost enough data and are looking to replace the motherboard.

Any suggestions, or do you think I am being premature in waiting for a solution?

Cheers, Paddy

[Jon P. Inghram]

You might try different IDE cables, I've had 'em go bad and cause wierd intermittent problems.

[Technoid]

not to mention that there are floating around some brands of sata cables that are not sheilded that causes corruption like crazy

[degrub]

Get rid of the AIW and replace it with a reasonable vid card. If he needs TV use a USB tuner. AIW drivers have caused a lot of issues over the years.

[Paddy]

Thanks. Will try all of the above.
Can you recommend a graphics card. I'll go hunting on ebay.

[degrub]

agp ? If he is playing HD video, consider a card with MPEG2 support in hardware. The power supply needs should be checked. Many of the newer cards require the direct power connection and enough amps on 5V rail. i think most of the ATI/AMD cards have the hardware MPEG2 support and some of the Nvidia as well. i used to have a BFG 7800 GS OC that i was pretty happy with.. May not need that powerful of a card though.

[Paddy]

not to mention that there are floating around some brands of sata cables that are not sheilded that causes corruption like crazy

Congrats! New cables sorted it out.
Cheers.

[Paddy]

Replacing the SATA cables has helped, but not completely solved the problem - still getting lots of chkdsk errors and corrupt partition tables, unable to install anything complicated. Any large downloaded files invariably mangled irrevocably. So I pulled the Radeon 8500DV and replaced it with an old Rage Fury Pro 32MB which I had lying around. And.... I think that might have fixed it? So far so good anyway. Don't know if the AIW is just on the way out, or some inherent incompatibility with the mobo. The combination has never really worked right.

That being the case, perhaps you could advise on a replacement graphics card? Nothing too fancy, but something that will give me a better score than 1.0 on vista. And I also miss the eye candy on gnome. Don't need dual head or TV in. DVI out is a must, and video/audio capture would be nice. Proper vista/linux driver support. If I got another AIW then presumably I could reuse the old breakout box? But the motherboard chipset is nvidia so that might be a factor. Budget parsimony of course is the overriding consideration!

Cheers!

[The PIT]

Also had this with dodgy memory as well. Worth a check.
Gnome sounds like you're using Linux so avoid ATI as ATI drivers are pooh in Linux.
For my Linux I've go to the dark side. Unlike ATI the card worked striaght out of the box no messing around or editing of files.

[Paddy]

sorry to be a pain, but I am quite out of touch. Can you recommend a model/series so that I can search for one on fleabay?

[Paddy]

i've seen GeForce 8600 GTS cards for ~£40 on ebay but they are all PCI-E. Looking at the nvidia lineup, it seems that the most recent AGP card is the 79 series. This seems to retail at more than double the price of a 8600 GTS!

I wonder if it is worth changing the motherboard to a cheap PCI-E one...

[Claymonkey]

What PSU is the system running on? I've had more 'funky' system problems be because of a PSU than anything else.

Also when I transitioned from 98 to 2k I was using a ka7 abit board and it would work fine in 98 but not in 2k... guess what the problem was... the generic 128 stick of ram I was using. the 98 box also had some funky issues but while still problematic not as dysfunctional as the 2k install.

[Paddy]

Thanks. He picked up a 7600 GS.

[UtwigMU]

Some people had problems with nForce SATA RAID drivers, use just the basic driver, uninstall nVraid.

[Claymonkey]

Some people had problems with nForce SATA RAID drivers, use just the basic driver, uninstall nVraid.

I second that motion