AB9 Pro BIOS 1.6 Problems

[broadwater]

Folks,

the new 1.6 BIOS (combined with the Jmicron 1.17.7.6 drivers from the Abit webpage)
has been a major disappointment for me. I have noticed a number of problems that
did not occur on the previous setup (BIOS 1.5, Jmicron 1.17.4.0 beta):

- there are two DVD writers attached to the JMicron IDE port. When the
Jmicron is set to AHCI or RAID in the BIOS, the drives appear as IDE DVD
drives, but are run in PIO mode only (and the Jmicron appears in device
manager as a "Dual-Channel PCI IDE bridge").
- when the JMicron is set to IDE, the two DVD drives appear as Scsi drives
and run at the expected speed, and the JMicron appears as a Scsi Raid
controller. Kind of the wrong way round, it seems ?!
- Resume from S3 does no longer work - the machine either hangs
showing an empty Windows desktop, or the screen stays dark
altogether. When I power-cycle the machine via the front power
button, it is stuck in POST 2A, and it won't come up unless it's removed
from mains.

I have to stress that with BIOS 1.5 and the earlier Jmicron drivers, both issues did *not*
appear - it definitely is the new BIOS that screws up things. And, yes, I did the
"Abit dance" of clearing CMOS extra carefully after the BIOS update, and I'm running the board
at stock speed - no overclocking.

Whoever is listening from Abit - please, could you acknowledge whether
there indeed is a problem with the BIOS 1.6/Jmicron 1.17.7.6 combo, and
what Abit intends to do to solve this.

Also, someone at Abit *should* be able to explain what the dreaded POST
code 2A is about.

Best regards

Hans-Christian

[d3fiant]

afaik this was a known issue with the beta 16, to be honest I bypassed this by getting a cheap SATA optical drive but I saw no benefit between using AHCI over IDE, obviously RAID offers completely different functionality. Out of interest why did u need to go to 16, the additional functionality gained from the new bios was limited?

[broadwater]

Hi d3fiant,

right, there was no dire need to upgrade, but the V1.6 release
notes mentioned a new AHCI BIOS, and I hoped that would fix
the quite excessive boot time of the board.

Cheerio

Hans-Christian

[d3fiant]

that upgrade was for the JMicron controller only fella, the ICH8R had AHCI already, alas the boot delay still exists. Considering the PIO mode for PATA devices when AHCI was enabled on the JMicron controller was known buring beta I am annoyed that they went final with that bug still there, perhaps the abit boys here can comment on that