I got a GA-7vaxp a couple of months ago but have not assembled the nachine yet. The main reason for the choice was the onboard RAID array. I wanted to store my music and edit family videos. So I need lots of storage capacity and the image function for safety.

It was not clear to me the max size of HDs that could be attached, so sent a message to customer service inquiring if 200Gb will work. They replied that the mobo has benn tested with 200Gb HDs so i would be ok.

I also mentioned in my message that my plan was to set four 200GB total, two in mirror and two for stripping in a configuration 1+0.

To my surprise, they indicated that the RAID on the GA-7vaxp can only be configured EITHER sripping or mirror but NOT both. I find this unbelievable.

Has anybody successfuly configured the 1+0 mode ???
Please reply

At the time this board was designed Manny, RAID 0+1 was the exception, not the rule. With the reliability of modern hard drives, I find the use of RAID 1 to be (forgive the pun) redundant. Why not just use a third 200gig and make occasional backups?

OOPS! sorry about the empty post above. I meant to share my accomplishment on ocing my Athlon XP 2500+ from 1.86 Ghz to 2.29 Ghz. CPU temp is around 45 C /113 F at full load from Sandra Pro 2003. I also replaced my Volcano 9 HSF and replaced it with the Vantec AeroFlow VA4-C7040, which is much more cooler, lighter, and quieter. Thanks Lensman for the suggestion. Off course thanks for this great board that hasn't gven me any problem.

Current system:

1)Athlon XP 2500+ (13.5 x 170FSB = 2.29Ghz) Vcore=1.81V I wish it could be lowered. Is there any way to manually enter the Vcore in BIOS? it only lets me change it to either "AUTO, +0.5, +1.0, +1.5, or something like that, I am not 100% sure. I would like to try 1.7V to 1.78V and see if it is stable.

2)Vantec AeroFlow VA4-C7040 HSF - the best! quieter, cooler, lighter, and cheap! $22

3)Gigabyte GA-7VAXP - it rocks!

4)Crucial (1) 512MB PC2700 cost me $45 - will soon replace it with a stick of Kingston HyperX 512MB PC2700 (Thx again Lensman)

5)PNY 64MB GeForce 4 Ti4200 - powerful enought for me, and cheap got lucky and cost me only $80.

6)Maxtor 80GB 7200 8MB cache HD - would not recommend - have to replaced it once for a "remanufactured" one! - next HD will be a Seagate or WD.

7)Antec SX835II Case - which I regret buying it because of its whooping avg. weight of 30lbs!!! - Benefits: Plenty of room and fans. Cables don't get too crouded and system doesn't get too hot. If you are looking for a cheap but good case, I would suggest the Maxtop CSX-147K-GF

7)Antec True Power 480W - got lucky and bought it for $80.00 shipped on Ebay!

8)16X DVD Rom - forgot the brand name

9)Lite-on 52x24x52 CD-RW drive

10)Four Antec Silent Fans

Gid Bless,
Ed

I meant to say "God Bless"

Ok. Lensman. Great advise.

What about booting on the RAID array configured as stripping (0), and then use a master and slave on drive C and D for back up. Maybe even synchronized, say using Iomega QuickSync. In theory this arrangement will be equivalent to (1+0).
Of course a better solution would be to but a true RAID mobo.
Anybody?

Hi all

I currently have this motherboard with an Athlon 1800XP. It runs as stable as a rock, however I would like to upgrade to an Athlon 2800XP Barton.

Any ideas on what steps I should take?

@ Manny - That arrangement should work well for you, especially if you run the operating system from the striped drives and configure a seperate partition for the Page file (swap file) at the beginning of your non-striped drive. (http://www.techtv.com/screensavers/windowstips/story/0,24330,3...64,00.html) This will allow you to avoid alot of fragmentation problems on the RAID array and should decrease the access time to the Page file.

@ Andy - It is a 'drop in and go' procedure. Depending on whether the chip is the older 266mhz or the newer 333mhz model, you may have to adjust your FSB switch on the MB.

Hi, I have lost my onboard nic and firewire and have tried reflashing the bios with F13 and F14 with no luck. This happened after loading failsafe defaults to try out somethings but on loading optimised defaults they won't come back. I was trying to fix a problem with my raid, in that the performance dropped from 41xxxKb/s to 29xxxKb/s after oveclocking from an fsb of 144 to 180, after modding my mobo.

Can Anyone help me,

Thanks in Advance

not anymore. ga-7n400 pro2 now. much better

I got ga-7vaxp ultra
Everything else doesn't really matter to my problem. Thing is, I recently built a computer for friend. He got the 1 gig DDR 400 chip. Didn't work with Asus. Worked in mine. *For awhile.* Blue screens, more blue screens, and now I can't even load XP on a blank HD. Tried on a 200 gig and an 80 gig * To humor the OS 137GB limit*

Took out everything but CD-RW, HD, Processor, and Memory.

Come to find out the 1 gig was really a 333 overclocked to 400... *2700 to 3200*
I seriously think that threw a major glitch in the settings in the bios. I've upgraded to the F6 and downgraded
to the F4 back and forth a few times. Cleared the CMOS the best I could, *Removed Battery for 10 minutes, and shorted the two contacts in that bios unit thing.* I've been reading your post all day trying to find an answer other than the board bites. *Even though I'm really beginning to agree*

I don't want to be the smartest, I don't care if someone wants to call me the dumbest hick that surfed in here.
But I'm stumped... I'm going to take the Overclocking Memory information and try to use that to my advantage in the Advanced Menu.

To those that questioned the 400Mhz Memory... PC3200 doesn't work with 333Mhz FSB CPUs according to the manual. *Which led me to check mine and find out it was overclocked 2700...*

Forgive me but doesn't that sound retarded? 333Mhz FSB and 400 DDR! Come Buy me!

and small print. *Can't use both! One or the other!*
If someone who praises Gigabyte can help. Please do. I got an Asus sitting right next to me, but I hate to
throw away a motherboard I believe still has hope.

*Getting few different Blue Screen errors. No chance of loading an OS in current state however. One message refers to USB. When disabled, it changes to IRQ not Less or Equal to. Which leads me to working on the memory settings.

Thanks for any help and all the help received so far and so on.
Wisc

Follow-up of my troubleshooting.

That one gig chip did some MAJOR damage to my computer. *I guess I shouldn't say major, because it didn't do any physical damage*
For those tuning in I got a DDR 3200 1 gig chip. However *Thanks to removing the heatspreaders on the chip* I found out it was truely a 2700 chip instead.

The gig chip being overclocked took over the settings for the memory and pushed them upward in effort to maintain the new chip. Silly me thinking *This one gig chip bites! It's slowing everything down, and giving me blue screens! I'll take it out and put back in my 512's.* Well since the gig chip changed the settings, the problems started here.

Gigabyte GA-7VAXP Ultra *gosh knows about the other boards*... Has a serious flaw. It should have detected the 512's and set the settings accordingly.

I took out the bios battery and went to smoke a ciggeratte. Came back and touched the contacts inside the battery housing in hopes that would act like the Clear CMOS jumper other boards have. Did that fix the problem?

No... I had to search and read up on CAS and Ticks, Cycles, Clocks, up one bank down the other, yaddie yah yah... Anyway in my research I found someone elses settings *Overclockers wanting to show off. THANK YOU!!!* And got it to where everything is fine.

However... That isn't it. My 200 Gig WD drive wasn't booting. ??? I loaded XP on an 80 gig and put the 200 as a slave. NOTHING! It shows it, but you can't do anything. You look at it in properties, and see 0, and it's all blue like I've seen the CD-RW do on bad disk.

Dang it. O.K. So I'll put my 160 Gig in and get that Get Data Back program installed. See what I can do.

WHAT! The 160 Gig having the same blimmidy problem!!! WHAT did this memory chip DO to me!!! The dang thing come packed with a virus waiting in it?

I've tried half a dozen different disk programs for getting your data back. Only 2 of them are seeing the hard drive. The others are treating it like windows is. Nothing there!

Get Data Back and File Recovery... However File Recovery is failing after 3 hours of scanning the 200 Gig HD. Get Data Back is still in the process of scanning. A 3 hour scan as well. Hopefully it doesn't crash toward the end. And more of a concern is I hope it doesn't show up with garbage. Chunk0002.JPG crap. NO THANK YOU!

I've decided to look into rebuilding the MBR. Maybe then I can repair the NTFS files needed if they still need it. And DiskPatch *Previously known as RepoMan* looks like it's going to ice my cake. I'll put it to the test as soon as I finish downloading it. From the other users comments, I'm getting very hopeful.

Shot through the heart again. Going to try PQ Partition Magic and see if that will make the drive the NTFS so it can be seen through disk management anyway.

If anyone else has been through this, please don't hesitate to throw me ideals.

Wisc

I have a GA-7avXP. I have 2x 80 GB Maxtor and 2x 120 GB Maxtor.
I have always runned with the 80 GBs. Yesterday I would try to connect both the 2 80s and the 2 120s on the Promise RAID onboard system. The board seems to have a problem running 2x Striping-RAID on 4 discs. It seems to have somthing to do with the LITE-BIOS. I want to run 2X Striping RAID on my discs. Can Enyone halp me doing that?

Hi, I'm trying to connect a WD 120GB ATA100 drive to IDE3 on my GA-7VAXP. I've used the cable that came with the board, updated to latest rev's of drivers and bios, changed the option in the bios to ATA, not RAID, and installed the software in Windows XP. But the system still tells me on bootup that the BIOS hasn't been installed bcoz there's no dirve attached. Can anyone help please??
Thanks, DInk

Can't strip 4 drives, or mirror them on one Raid Channel. Master 1, and Master the other drive you got a raid set. You can't strip the slaves.

Your best bet, get an ATA Controller card that supports Raid as well.


--------------------------


The 120 Gig feller that want's to put the drive on IDE 3... If it's the only drive on that IDE then take out the pin in the back of the drive. Most people make the mistake of putting it as a Master. With no slave, it's a bad ideal.

However if you already tried taking the pin outta the back of the Hard Drive and still have trouble... Don't know. Need more information. Did ya play with other cables, does the HD work on channel 1 or 2? Did ya scan the drive for defects in another system to make sure it wasn't a faulty drive, etc...

Hopefully you just have the pins set up to make the drive a master and that's what is wacking you out. Nothing like it being a simple problem! But being a computer, what are the chances of that?

Cause we ALL KNOW!!! You can't just do one simple thing on a computer!!! NOOO... A five minute task could take HOURS! Or even DAYS to get through! Because these peices of POOP have to have a mind of their own!

*BTW... To follow up on my one post. The dos based DiskPatch program didn't fix my problem. It looks like a very promising program for someone who kills their MBR with FDisk... But who does that? And if someone is playing with Fdisk and screw up, do they really care? I mean I never played with FDisk at all, but I reckon that it's mainly used to set up a drive. *New one that is*

Anyway. Last resort. I'm trying to use File Recovery to get my copy of Partition Magic off the one drive and see if I can play around with that.

I'm going to play with the ideal I can put the NTFS file system back on the drive somehow. Nothing is reading them as ANY file system. No Fat, No NTFS no Nothing!... So if I can get Windows to read it as NTFS, I should be able to access the drive.

Still in search.
Wisc

Rotten Hummmer.

You can download a full raid F13 bios from http://lumberjacker.kettenfett.com/ It covers many makes of motherboard including Gigabyte.

You also have to use different drivers which are also available from this site.I'm using the F13 modded bios as it has more overclocking options as well. Please see the excellent feature from Adrian Jones posted on 30 May 2003 on this forum.

I don't know if the modded bios will cure your problem but it's worth a try. I run a 40 gig IBM Deskstar on IDE 3 as an ATA 133 drive.

I have version 1.1 of this board and have had no problems at all. Due to the hot summer I've fitted a Thermaltake Volcano 11 Xaser cpu fan which is excellent and my processor temperature now stays below 40 centigrade.

Hope this helps.

Big Thanks to Misc!! You solved my problem with putting a hard drive onto IDE3. I just moved accross a master and slave combination and it worked a treat : )
Cheers, Dink

Helped Dink? Forgive me for patting my own back, but it's a first for me!

Anyway the final conclusion to my problem. I've done a low level format on the hard drives. And am using Get Data Back NTFS to get the files I wanted backed up to another hard drive.
Everything is back to normal.

I've got my Advance Bios Settings - Control+F1 - DDR2700 512MB Chips setup as the following
*For anyone else that actually needs settings that will work for them.*

First setting I have as normal.
DRAM Timing I put Manual cause auto was trying to blast it to the settings of that 1 gig chip.
Cas Latency at 2 *for stability* 2.5 worked for me with other settings, but got confusing.
4 Bank
3T
6T
3T
4
4 Level
2T
3T-6T
1T
128M for video card crap
And Enabled the last three options.

If anyone has clarifications to this, and maybe a more reliable settings from a more reliable source
please... We'd apperciate it. Me and anyone else that got totalled over an overclocked 1G chip.

Wisc

Has anyone gotten the FSB to get to the 333 like it should be. I can only get mine to get up to 133.

Specs:

1.67 processor
512 PC3200 RAM
GeForce FX5200 graphics


I tried to run the easytune and nothing will work!

Thank You,

Chris

eh?

Sounds like your getting your FSB and your CPU CLK speeds mixed up the FSB will go at 333MHz if it's a 2600+ minimum (or your overclocking) and the clock speed of the chip will run at 166MHz (again if it's a 2600+ minimum or your overclocking) and your 1.67GHz is telling me it's around about the 1900/2000/2100+ CPU range.......unless you have underclocked the chip?

Will it make a difference in the sound quality if I add a Sound Blaster Live 5.1 sound card to my GA-7VAXP motherboard that has onboard sound? Will it have any improvement?
Thanks,
Ed