Tips

having corruption problems with your Soyo Dragon Plus? date added/updated 7/Oct/2002 keywords Soyo Dragon Plus corruption VT8233 advice Before my following advice, I'll just add a disclaimer here that what I describe on this page is just my own experience with this motherboard. You may not necessarily have the same problems. I suppose it may even be possible that I just got one from a bad batch. My advice is to turn DMA off for all ide drives IMMEDIATELY, and check if you are getting corruption. In my experience, the Soyo Dragon Plus is a piece of shit which causes massive filesystem corruption. One way to test for the corruption (probably not the easiest) if you have room on your disks is to make a copy of some really big directory ( bigger than the amount of memory you have in MB) and then compare them with diff --brief -r source_dir copied_dir On my system that caused about 14 differences or so, out of about 500 files. What that means is that on my system, every time a file was copied, modified (read & rewritten) from disk, there was about a 3% chance that it would be corrupted. It seems to be related to DMA (any dma mode, not just UDMA). For 3 months I used one of these pieces of shit, not realising it was corrupting files all over the place. For another 6 months I ran it with DMA off, trying various patches VIA claimed would fix the problem - all to no effect. Don't trust hardware review web sites claiming that a motherboard is 'stable'. In my experience it is all bullshit. I won't be buying VIA or Soyo hardware again, if I can help it. Apparently, the bios is supposed to set up the VIA IDE chip and wasn't doing it properly, which would be Soyo's fault, but all VIA's patches which supposedly set up the timing themselves anyway did not work for me. Every other possible fix or workaround I found did not work - including disabling the onboard sound, raid etc. You may want to try an ASUS A7V - it also has a via chipset but doesn't seem to have the filesystem corruption problems that my Soyo system has. At least, not that I have discovered yet. A bit more description about the problem I had I discovered the problem when burning a bunch of .rpm files to a cd. After burning the cd, I did a comparison of all the rpms on the cd with the ones on disk to make sure they'd been burnt correctly. Lo and behold there were differences. I would have put that down to a badly burnt cd, but a second comparison produced different results. Files that had compared differently the previous run seemed to be OK now, and other files were different! I then copied the files on to disk and compared them again. Once again, there were difference, in different files. Then I thought it was my my filesystem (reiserfs at the time on that partition). I tried comparing copies of files on different partitions,filesystem types, and disks. The problems occurred every time - as long as I compared enough files that previously read files were no longer in the kernel file cache and had to be read off disk again - a byte would be changed here or there in the occasional file - some files would consistently be incorrect - presumably because the error had occurred when the file was being copied, otherwise random files would have a byte changed - in one of the two files being compared. In 650MB of files, I was getting about 14 corrupted files, mostly with only one byte incorrect, some with 2 or 3.The corruption occurred with both seagate and western digital drives, in the Soyo, but not at all on another linux computer with a different motherboard (and using dma). I ran memory tests to thouroughly test my memory - it was fine. The only thing that ever helped was completely turning off dma - which totally crippled the system. Totally. I couldn't burn a CD faster than 4x with dma off without getting buffer underruns - and I could do NOTHING else while it was burning. My athlon XP 1400+ (the reason I bought the Soyo) was useless because it could do nothing else while the disks were being accessed. The system was slower than my 2-3 year old PIII 550MHz. I paid a lot ($400) for that Soyo, just to get a choice of letting it corrupt all my files or having a system that was half the speed of my previous one. I'd also like to add here that the onboard sound is shit, and the onboard raid is shit. My advice regarding sound is to buy a Soundblaster Live! (a cheap one will do) and don't trust motherboard reviews that say how good this or that sound chip is.