New NT 4.34 drivers buggy? I started losing my drive translation

[jeepman]

I run NT 4.0 WS SP6 with a G400 DH 32MB on an ABIT BP6 dual Celeron. I recently updated to the 4.34 drivers.

The first issue I noticed was when I was working on my Web page and I viewed a graphic file full screen, when I went back to windowed mode, my Taskbar lost it's icons and was instead showing just black rectangles that fit the size of the icon that I used to see. I would have to turn on "auto-hide" for the Taskbar and let it "hide" and reappear before the I could see the icons again.

Also, when the system was under heavy use, I would get lockups. I would normally only lock when using SETI. Now, I was getting lockups quite often.

Now for the worst part, I tried Partition Magic 5 for the first time, and it reported my one of my drives was using translation that could lead to data corruption. The suggestion it gave was to back up the data, and recreate the partitions! I tried to boot under W98 to run Norton Disk Doctor, but the system hung.

I thought I had a virus. I ran Norton Anti-virus in NT, and F-Prot in W98 real mode DOS. No viruses. I started up PQMagic again, and now two of my drives showed incorrect translation. Getting freaked out now.

Booted under W98 in safe mode, and I saw some of my drive letters. Big problem though, my C drive also showed up as E:!

I booted back under NT, and now PQMagic showed four of my drives as having incorrect translation! I can see the data to back up, but I am now looking at backing up almost 30GB of drives. THEN, my screen messed up again, and I thought, could it be the video driver?

I did a manual uninstall, reinstalled the old drivers, rebooted and then started NT. I ran PQMagic, and NO issues were reported. I rebooted and I could get into W98 this time straight away, no Safe Mode!

I know this is long, but what gives here? I never had a bad driver from Matrox.

------------------
ABIT BP6, 192MB PC100 RAM, dual 366 Celerons oc'd to 550MHz, 3DFXCool GlobalWin FEP32 'Lil Mofo' h/s fans. G400 DH, 3COM 905B NIC, Buslogic FlashPoint LW Ultra-Wide SCSI, SBLive PCI 1024 (OEM SBLive Real Player). Segate Medalist PRO 9.1 GB UW SCSI 7200RPM, Maxtor 20.4GB ATA66 7200RPM 2MB Cache, 8GB tape b/u, IDE 32x CDROM, SCSI 4xwrite/8xread Panasonic CD writer, 4 more various 2GB SCSI drives.



[This message has been edited by jeepman (edited 06 December 1999).]

[Hank Kimble]

Have you tried returning your system to the standard bus of 66 to see if you still get the same problems. The fact that your system locks up when you're using seti suggests your system isn't handling being overclocked very well. Just because your system runs at 550 doesn't mean that it's working properly. I have a BP6 with dual 466. I overclocked my system to 2x560 and everything worked well except when I had to compress and decompress large files then I would get file errors. I would have left it at 560 but it would have driven me crazy because everytime I had a problem ( hardware or software ) then I couldn't help thinking that it might be my o/c'd system. I now run my system (BP6 - G400max)with the new NT drivers without problems.


Just my 0.02

[jeepman]

Hank,

I will try that because it is a step I did not take. But, I am active over on www.bp6.com and was involved in "florin's" thread about SETI. It appears SETI is an app that can crash even stable, non-oc'd systems running at default everything. I run SETI at work, and it occaisionally crashes two different Micron systems.

I did have the CRC issue before I got the FEP32's. Since adding the FEP32's, I can actually go to 104MHz FSB and NOT get any CRC's, even after several hours of normal use. I went back to 100MHz as a safety buffer. I also added thermal paste to the BX chipset, and I have a 90mm fan blowing across the BX greenie and I also get the G400 with the lower portion of the air pattern.

I can even run two instances of SETI, as long as I don't do anything else.

But, after loading the NT 4.34, I now recall that SETI was locking hard again. Normally, I would just get the PS/2 lockup.

Like I said, I may try to run default bus, but after what I went through with the drives, I may just let someone else experiment. I will stick with the old drivers...

[jsb]

Hello Jeepman.
Im running up to six instance off SETI and 4.34, have no problem doing that, never any lockups.
Stefan

[jeepman]

JSB,

thanks, that is the kind of info I am looking for. Success, or otherwise. I do know that my restoring the old 4.31 drivers, at least for me, has made my system "funtional" again. Also, everyone please note that I described definite screen corruption in NT, using just a graphic file viewer. I have never had problems in the past with this program ACDeeSee.

I also do know that I am running a SBLive, with LiveWare 3.0 on a Dual processor system. This can be problematic because of Creative "drivers."

With these SBLive drivers, I cannot reliably use my IDE CDROM. The system posts errors to the Event Log saying the CDROM has timed out, along with the Intel ATA driver. If I start the system with my "/onecpu" BOOT.INI switch, I have no problems.

The drives that had the incorrect translation were all SCSI. I have never seen this before.

I also know that Win 98 now will boot, after I have deleted the drivers. I threw the SETI comment in there because it was very different behaviour after I loaded the NT 4.34 drivers.

[This message has been edited by jeepman (edited 07 December 1999).]