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

[rkmca]

1. Is your HDD connected to RAID connector in the MB ? This should be the BLUE color. If so did you download the Promise ATA100 driver, if not download it from http://www.asus.com/products/Motherboard/driver_ide.html#ata100
Is the BIOS setting for HDD set to ATA100 ?

2. When you buy a HDD, if you read the technical info, if it says 40.6G unformatted or something like this, then its not a true 40.6G. After format whatever the size is thats the real HDD capacity. Is your formatted or unformatted, what does it say in the box ? Go to maxtor.com, they have a formula, how to calculate actual size.

3. My suggestion get a good CD-ROM like TEAC 540E which is only 40x but faster than lots of 50x drive. OR get a CD-RW, you will get 32x but good for loading and playing games, music etc.

Hope this helps.

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RM

[mjc]

double post

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mjc
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