The 8237 is junk. Complete junk.
I'm done with Abit and VIA products. Done. I've been an Abit faithful for years despite a virtual guarantee of some stupid problem doing the most menial things, and they really don't care. I used to run a KT7A-RAID and it had a host of problems. Figured I'd upgrade, got a KV7, and what do you know, it has inherent unresolved SATA problems.
A bit of background. I am running an Athlon 3200+ with 1GB of Kingston RAM - no overclocking, nothing fancy. Used to run a WD 200GB with 8 MB cache EIDE drive as my boot drive and it literally never ever crashed. Ever. Not once.
I always knew that I had an SATA RAID available on the board but all my drives were IDE, so I never used it.
Got a great deal on a Western Digital "Raid Edition" 250 GB SATA (150) when shopping for a 250 GB EIDE drive. Nice! More speed to my boot drive! I was kinda due to reinstall XP anyway, sooooo.....
I slipstreamed SP2 and the SATA raid drivers into my XP Professional CD and it installed just great! Fast - really fast. So far so good!
So I start using the thing....blue screen, restarted. Fluke, I thought. Wrong. ntfs.sys BSOD stops. Other BSOD stops.
I'd do the most menial thing and whammo, another blue screen. Mind you, this is the system that never ever ever crashed with an EIDE drive for the boot drive.
Must be the RAID driver, I thought. I've tried 5 different versions. Same result.
It's barely useable at this point. Crash. Crash. Crash. Microsoft doesn't have a solution. VIA doesn't have a solution. Abit (of course) doesn't have a solution. It's definitely not the WD drive. I'm 150% positive. I researched this and hey, look at that, tons of other people with the 8237 Southbridge and this onboard SATA controller are having this issue too. The 8237's SATA controller is defective junk.
It's not bad RAM. It's not a bad drive. It's not a bad power supply. It's not a bad driver. It's not spyware. It's not a virus. I run the tightest PC ship on earth, trust me. I am virtually convinced that this is another chipset defect. VIA's been sued over things like this in the past. My BIOS is current and was cleared after the update. This is the same data corruption problem that many others are experiencing that are preventing them from even booting into XP!! For what Abit gets for their boards, you'd think they'd take care of something like this.
I will never - ever - ever purchase another VIA/Abit board. I'm sick of being their guinea pig.
This isn't misuse, guys, this is everyday computer use. It's almost deceptive that they advertise that it has this WOWEE SATA RAID!!! and it doesn't even work right. What good's a PC if you can't use it without it crashing at random like 15 times a day? ENRAGING.
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More things you should know. I'm the guru for the gurus. When the gurus can't solve a system problem, they give it to me. I'm no hack.