Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.asus (More info?)

I tried to install a firewire pci card (adaptec fireconnect 4300) on my
computer but my computer would not boot up. The fan turned on but no
beeps. This is for use with an external drive. I bought and external
Iogear 160gig hardrive which supports both usb 2.0 and firewire. I've
find the biggest limitation to my nearly five year old computer to be
the hardrive. The internal hardrive seems to be wedged in pretty good
and I didn't want to mess with it.

Anyone have any experience installing firewire or usb 2.0 for that
matter on the p3v4x boards. Any help would be appreciated.

My specs:
Pentium 3 533mhz
256mb ram
Fujitsu MPE3136AT 13 gig hardrive
Ati rage fury 32mb graphics card
aureal vortex advantage sound card
winfast tv 2000 xp capture card
Linksys LNE 100TX(v5) Fast Ethernet adapter
Creative DI5630 Data fax modem (Installed, but not in use because I
have DSL)
Hitachi DVDROM GD-5000
LG CD-RW GCE-8525B

I have windows xp and the original 1999 award winning bios.

I still have 2 pci slots left.

BTW, Windows XP has run quite well on this old machine with the
recommended tweaks. If it didn't, I would have bought a new computer a
year ago.

Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.asus (More info?)

In article <1105315796.704520.273270@c13g2000cwb.googlegroups.com>,
pisst316@yahoo.com wrote:

> I tried to install a firewire pci card (adaptec fireconnect 4300) on my
> computer but my computer would not boot up. The fan turned on but no
> beeps. This is for use with an external drive. I bought and external
> Iogear 160gig hardrive which supports both usb 2.0 and firewire. I've
> find the biggest limitation to my nearly five year old computer to be
> the hardrive. The internal hardrive seems to be wedged in pretty good
> and I didn't want to mess with it.
>
> Anyone have any experience installing firewire or usb 2.0 for that
> matter on the p3v4x boards. Any help would be appreciated.
>
> My specs:
> Pentium 3 533mhz
> 256mb ram
> Fujitsu MPE3136AT 13 gig hardrive
> Ati rage fury 32mb graphics card
> aureal vortex advantage sound card
> winfast tv 2000 xp capture card
> Linksys LNE 100TX(v5) Fast Ethernet adapter
> Creative DI5630 Data fax modem (Installed, but not in use because I
> have DSL)
> Hitachi DVDROM GD-5000
> LG CD-RW GCE-8525B
>
> I have windows xp and the original 1999 award winning bios.
>
> I still have 2 pci slots left.
>
> BTW, Windows XP has run quite well on this old machine with the
> recommended tweaks. If it didn't, I would have bought a new computer a
> year ago.

Could this be a power problem ? You don't say what size the PSU
happens to be, and perhaps adding this last card is one card
too many.

If this was my computer, I'd remove all other PCI cards and just
test the Adaptec card, to see if I could get the BIOS to come up.
Write down which slot each card was in, so you can put it all back.
You don't want the computer to boot when it has been stripped
down, just run it long enough to see the BIOS start. Add back PCI
cards, until it stops. See if there is some kind of conflict
between two of your cards. Try the Adaptec card in slot 3 or
in slot 6 (counting from the processor), as those slots don't
share interrupt signals with other hardware.

Looking at the P3V4X download page, there aren't any bug fixes
relevant to your problem, listed for the various BIOS files still
on the page. It could be that flash upgrading the BIOS would help,
but I have no evidence to back that up. Flashing a BIOS is not
without risk, especially as a board gets older. (Looking in Google
with the three terms "p3v4x flash bios" yielded far too many
failure reports. I caught a glimpse of "disable byte merge before
flashing", implying you'll need to find a good recipe of
how to flash this board before proceeding. You could always
try getting a flash chip from badflash.com with the latest P3V4X
code on it, if you are squeamish. The flash chip is a big plastic
DIP package and these are easy to remove from their sockets.)

There have been a few posts in this group, of various modern
card types not working in P2B family boards. The P3V4X is a little
more modern, but again, Google isn't showing the kind of problem
you are experiencing.

The Adaptec card could be dead - did you purchase it new or
was this a used card from Ebay or elsewhere ?

The picture of the Adaptec card on the Adaptec site, makes it
look like it is actually a good implementation of Firewire. It
might actually have an isolation circuit for powering Firewire
devices, something that other Firewire solutions don't have.
On the other hand, the picture of the board shown on the
Newegg site, shows a single chip solution, leading me to wonder
whether Adaptec has several different versions of the card with
the same (4300) part number ? If that is the case, then it may
be difficult to draw conclusions about the card, from reading
about it in Google.

So, try simplifying your hardware config, and see if things
work any better. That is all I can suggest. And pray it isn't
a P2B type problem, as we haven't figured out what causes the
problems with modern PCI cards and old P2B-xxx family boards.

HTH,
Paul