GGTS seem to be having difficulty in understanding the US3L motherboard problems I've pointed out to them. Thus far, I've been experiencing:-
Non-stop accesses to/from the HDD (unstable situation).
Random accesses occurring to the FDD, nothing in FDD. About 6 -10 per hour.
Inability to set second of two optical drives into DMA mode, in Device Manager(permanently greyed out as PIO mode).
PCI soundcard playing soundfiles properly only about 50% of the time, remainder grossly distorted and audibly related to the HDD accesses.
Random BSODs.
Passed another great wadge of information to them this morning but I'd say that unless they get their BIOS and motherboard driver expert(s) on to it, we'll not get anywhere. It's no good them asking me for recordings of the noises the drives make, or of conducting other facile checks that I've already told them I've done.
One thing I've been wondering is whether the Q-Flash utility program is held in ROM on the motherboarsd, ie. ROM rather than anything reprogrammable. Anyone know? If Q-Flash was corrupted at the time that I used it to flash BIOS FH, the latest for this US3L board, then I'll have in all probability ended up with a corrupted BIOS FH, even though I had no problem when actually flashing it. A corrupted BIOS could explain an awful lot.
Am fast running out of things to try. At this stage, I'm convinced it's either down to the BIOS or to the Intel INF driver, or a bit of both. The INF driver for the US3L is, after all, just a beta driver. I suspect that, compared to many other current Gigabyte boards, the US3L gets little attention by Gigabyte, since far fewer people will opt for it (since it embodies ports for legacy devices and is regarded as an old-type).
Am having to use my old PC most of the time, as the longer I keep this PC on, the more those constant HDD accesses are wearing the HDD out.
