New A7N8X Deluxe - Probs booting

[chizh]

Bought myself a rev 2.0 board with 1003 bios , retail AMD XP2600+ and 1x Elixer PC3200 512Mb. All to replace my old innards.
Posts ok but says I'm running at 1050 Mhz and displays the machine summary then
Athlon X........

then starts to boot XP-PRO.

And heres the main problem. When first switched on I got the blue 'shutting down for safety' screen claiming problems with the IDE controllers. Rebooted and now I get another blue screen ' bios not APCI compatible... press F7 on next screen etc.'

Can't get past this no matter what I try.

Have d/l the 1007 bios but not flashed it yet. Also read about re-installing windows rather than trying a repair but can't boot from CD-ROM yet either !!!
Any other ideas ???

[chizh]

Half sorted. Found that 1004 bios is the first on a v2 board to support the barton 2600+. Will have to see what a flash does now ! Hopefully it'll sort out a couple of the other probs I'm having.

[Hippie on hill]

I think you're heading for a format and reload tbh m8.
The board runs in APIC mode as opposed to ACPI which your last board ran. This controls the IRQ setiings amongst other things, once it's set up you should have soemthing like 22 IRQs compared to 14 (I think) from before.
You might be able to install windows on top but the APIC/ACPI setting is 1 of the 1st things it installs as the setup treats the chip like a multi processor installation.
Maybe sum1 else can clarify this for us pls?

Anyway, have U been into the BIOS and tried setting the chip and mem speed yet?
It should read
CPU EXT FREQUENCY - 166
CPU FREQUENCY MULTIPLE SETTING - AUTO
SYSTEM PERFORMANCE - OPTIMAL
CPU FREQUENCY MULTIPLE - 12.5X
CPU INTERFACE - OPTIMAL
MEMORY FREQUENCY - 200

The CPU freq may well go a bit higher later but for stability and setting up I'd stick to about 12.5.

HTH

[chizh]

Thx for the reply Hookerman. Flashed with Uber 1007 - far more control over the bios - and system has now been set up correctly and I can boot from cd too. Set up as 11.5x166 as the box indicates 1917 running speed. Will tweak once I'm running.

Thing is I've no got to re-activate my 'copy' of xp

Next major play with it will be Sat morn. If it doesn't go well then yeah, a reformat will be called for. Or might just bite the bullet and buy the SATA drive I was gonna buy next month and do a fresh install and xfer my stuff across.