Quick question re Via 686B issues...

[Hodgkinson]

Hi, just a quick question,
I've been and dug out a stack of various Amiga and PC CD's and im looking to back them up using Alcohol 120% to some old unused and formatted 4.3GB Quantum drives that I've got screwed into caddies. We've had numerous CD's die on us before, and all too often it's been CDR's with irreplaceable photos etc on them.

System IDE configuration:
Via 686B Southbridge (Brrr, shudder…)
Primary master: Main system 80GB drive
Primary slave: Brand new Samsung DVD writer
Secondary master: Caddy bay for 4.3GB drives
Secondary slave: Lite-On 52x CD-Reader (Getting on a bit...)

Option 1: Use the brand new Samsung DVD drive to read the CD's, of which the drive will detect sub-channels when the Lite-On drive fails to do so. However, this is a cross- channel IDE transfer between the DVD drive and the caddy HDD which is known to suffer from corruption issues due to the VIA 686B chipset.

Option 2: Use the older Lite-On 52x reader, which is on the same IDE channel as the caddy HDD, but risk missing subchannel and similar information from the image.

The system has had the latest motherboard VIA 4in1 drivers installed from the MSI website and doesn't have a SBLive! card installed (As this seems to be the cause of most corruption problems).

I've been and ran a little test, moving a ~300MB video from the main 80GB HDD to the backup HDD in the caddy 20 times - A cross-channel IDE transfer - And file compare showed up no differences between the test video file and the original.

Which method do you folks think I should use? 1 or 2?

Sorry, this should probably be in the CH but I’m hoping to backup most of the disks later today…And I know how helpful you folks are ;-)

Thanks!
Hodgkinson.

[Ilwrath]

As a former 686B VIA southbridge owner (A7V series motherboard), I'd say you have things under control.  The latest 4in1 drivers is always a good place to start with that thing.  

If your test was good with a 300MB video file, I'd think you should be golden for the cross-channel IDE work.  (Although you might want to try it with a bunch of tiny files and see what happens...)  I actually had better luck with cross-channel work than I did with on-channel work.  Until the whole southbridge blew out, at least.  Then it didn't detect any more devices.  :lol:

[Hodgkinson]

Thanks for the advice! I'll dig out a small file from somewhere and give that a try ;-)

Hodgkinson.

[Hodgkinson]

About 80 transfers of a ~1.5MB BMP file yielded no errors either (And this was using the other 4.3GB quantum drive, just so I didn't wear the first drive out too quickly...).

Looks like everything’s OK then.

Minor continuation questions ;-) ...
Isn't the 686B limited to ATA100, as opposed to the faster ATA133? Any ideas what kind of UDMA modes you were achieving there? (I can't get any of the HDD's to go above UDMA mode 3 no matter what I do...)
And on a similar note, does anyone know where 120GB HDD's might be available from? (I presume the system is limited to drive size as it appeared to ruin a brand new 160GB HDD...)

Hodgkinson.

EDIT: Mods, please feel free to move this thread into the CH if necessary ;-)

[mike-]

Oi, i suggest you flash your bios and get the latest legacy drivers from viaarena.com . I have an old box which i think is a 686B never had data loss as you describe however i've noticed that the VIA chipsets sucks as compared to the nvidia chipset on x86 atleast, not as much as the laptop ati chipset. i always considered via to be quite stable :S Secondly, dont use windows ^^