Various system problems

[Deathstryk]

1. I have an a7v motherboard with RAID. Whenever it boots up it has this ultra 100 bios "thing', that starts up and takes approx. 2 min to bypass and then it says no drives detected and goes on, is this unavoidable?.
2. I bought a 40.6 gig drive. (Diamond max). after installing it, it only reads as 37 gig. why is that?. and is it correctable?.
3. and lastly, my cd rom is a generic 50x. ive had it for approx. 3 years.
it has great difficulty reading burned cd`s, also it tends to, when reaching full speed, "slip", in that it jumps in the tray. also it makes loud noise when playing occasionaly, and i have to hold the drive tray closed firmly to make it stop. should i buy a new one or simply get a cleaning kit?.

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AMD Thunderbird 950
A7V 133-266 fsb
128 pc-133
40.6 gig
gts geforce 2 32mb
sbl value

[mjc]

As to your questions,

1. You should be able to disable the Ata100 controller in BIOS, the instructions on how to do this should bbe in the manual that came with the board.

2. The discrepancy can be caused by one of the following:

[list=1]
"The final factor determining a drives capacity is how the drive is rated by the manufacturer. Some drive manufacturers have determined that 1 megabyte is the equivalent of 1 million bytes. Other manufacturers call 1 megabyte the equivalent of 1024 bytes times 1024. Computers store information in RAM and utilize hard drive space according to the second rating system because of the binary basis of computers. By using the '1 million bytes per megabyte' rule, a drive can be described as being larger" the larger the drive the bigger the difference.
size of the FAT and/or swap file
[/list=a]
usually there is no way to overcome this and it is very common.

3. With 52x drives being in the sub $30 range it is probably cheaper to replace it with the problems you describe as having, but a good clean may help, too.


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mjc
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