. 

sounds right, good speeds there :)

have you tried 1280x1024 with 2x AA, imo that looks better than 1024 with more AA but its just my preference. 

i'm a big fan of running in higher res with less AA. although, with my current hardware, that's not really good these days. :P 

it is a problem at times that my monitors native resolution is 1280x1024 when new games seem to chug a bit at that res and lowering the res creates those ugly resampling artefacts you get on tfts... 

have you guys ever heard of video card drivers causing a monitor to flicker and have strange artifacts?

ever since i installed the new ati drivers, my monitor has been flickering like mad every once in a while. but it also happens when i uninstall the drivers (running in that default vga mode or whatever when no drivers are installed) and when i installed omega drivers.

is it just a crazy coincidence that my monitor is going to die soon or can there be an actual reason from the drivers? (maybe some file that got installed with the ati drivers and didn't uninstall afterward?) 

Just got a TrackIR 4. What it does is tracks your head movement via IR, allowing you to in realtime, use your head to look around in games. Mostly for flight/racing sims, but I know of one FPS that supports independent head movement - Armed Assault.

I've been using it in Falcon 4.0 Allied Force, MS Flight Simulator 2004, IL-2 Sturmovik, GTR 2.

You can also use it in games that don't support Track IR out of the box, by using mouse tracking mode, but I have not tried that.

Demo video, theres plenty more around:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_c8wmsD7604 

i had to replace my motherboard, and so that meant a fresh install of windows.

the thing is, one of my hard drives, a 300gb ata is showing up as unformatted (in fact, in disk management, it's showing as 128GB unformatted and 170gb as unallocated).

i don't see why that hard disk would have been erased, and i'd really like to get it running as it contains most of my games, specifically stalker with my current save games... o.o

is there something i forgot to install to make windows recognize larger hard drives or something? i have a 200gb ata that's working fine though. 

it's a 48-bit LBA issue: http://www.48bitlba.com

If it is, you may need to apply XP SP2 before mounting the big disk. 

isn't that only something you do with new hdds?

as far as i can tell, there's nothing to mount, it's there, but whenever i try to access the disk, windows asks if i'd like to format it. 

connecting it so Windows detects it. If you were already running XP SP2 when the disk was detected, I guess it isn't a 48-bit LBA issue.

You also say that you have a 200GB disk working, which also implies that your system can handle disks >128GB. I assume you're using NTFS for all this.

Otherwise I don't know. 

i usually end up with the really wierd and oddball problems :P

i'll hang on a little while longer and keep searching, but eventually, i'll just cave and reformat the pos. :\

just fyi: i am indeed running sp2.

what really confuses me is why it got split up into 2 partitions, one of 128gb unformatted, and one of 170gb unallocated. before the reinstallation, it was just one huge partition.
it seems like it just somehow spontaneously blew up during windows' installation. o.0 

I had that. My 300gb was not recognised as one big partition, I just lived with the split.

No idea what causes it, but I think it's a MB compatiility with windows (without any of the sps) issue. 

so is there a way to recover the data on it then? 

I misunderstood, you just reinstalled windows.

My situation was when I was first installing the hard drive (which sounds more like what aguire described), windows wouldnt format it as one partition.

But if you can access it, cant you copy stuff off it ? 

it shows up alongside all my other HDDs, but when i try to open it, windows insists it's not formatted.
when i use the 'computer management' program, it shows up as 2 partitions, 128mb unformatted and 170mb unallocated.

i just can't understand how that happened or where all the data went.

is it possible for windows to some how not be reading it correctly?
the drive is less than a year old, and i highly doubt it's broken already. it was working perfectly fine a couple of days ago. 

And check it out?

There are NTFS drivers for DOS, and liveCDs of various flavours that could do the job. 

What does your BIOS now show for that drive?

Maybe it is set for the wrong size - automatic detection may have failed for some reason. If so, you should be able to tell it what is fitted. 

You have checked the master/slave and primary/secondary setup, and not inadvertantly re-connected the drives in the wrong order?

If the data on the drive is not backed-up somewhere, and you did not reformat the drive, don't give up. The data is still on the drive and it can be recovered. We just need to find the right solution to the problem. 

yep, master/slave jumper settings are still correct.

the bios is very wierd, at least to me. it's an asus p5w dh deluxe, and instead of what would seem normal to me (ie: primary ide master/slave for the 2 P-ATA HDDS and secondary ide master/slave for my two cdrom drives), it shows my S-ATA HDDs are IDE HDDs, complete with master/slave settings! o.0
also, the P-ATA HDDs don't even show up in the list (the list looks like this:
Primary IDE Master/Slave (Both CDRom Drives)
Third IDE Master/Slave (Both S-ATA HDDs)
Fourth IDE Master/Slave (Nothing)

there's no secondary ide master/slave set.
BUT the P-ATA drives do show up in the boot sequence menu.

Also, according to what i've seen in the bios, and what's written in the manual, you can't manually enter HDD information like in older motherboards.

i get the feeling tech has moved on, and left me behind. o.o 

OK. It seems that lots of people have had lots of problems with this board.

Here's one thread that mention some HD problems and solutions:
http://www.thepatri0t.net/2006/10/14/asus-p5b-deluxe-problems-solution/

And another that goes into a RAID setup:
http://forumz.tomshardware.com/hardware/P5W-DH-Deluxe-RAID-ftopict201524.html

I'm on an old Asus and when I had problems with an new 300G drive, I simply changed the setting in the BIOS. It seems as though it is not quite so straightforward now.

I'm probably not being much help, sorry. 

the first article you linked was for a different motherboard, but i'm updating the jmicron drivers like it says anyway.

i also tried what blackdog said and got a bootdisk made to read ntfs from dos from here: http://www.ntfs.com/boot-disk.htm
when i tried to take a look at the drive in question, i got the message: "Error reading sector #0 or Boot Sector is invalid".

so i thought maybe the boot sector got broken or something. apparently, ntfs also stores a copy of the boot sector at "the end of the logical volume" according to http://support.microsoft.com/kb/153973 . i tried to figure out what they are talking about with dskprobe.exe, but i didn't have much luck... this kind of stuff is beyond me.

in anycase, gonna restart and see if the jmicron driver update helped. (wanted to write this down before i lost all the webpages again :P) 

it didn't help. :\

i'm running out of ideas here. :S 

wierdness... the new jmicron drivers i installed also installed some kind of raid configuration program. the wierd part is that it seems like it's made to make a raid out of my ide hard drives! is that even possible? what's going on here? o.0 

Did you manage to solve the problem?

If so, can you comment on why you chose that particular board - It seems to get good reviews, albeit that some users have had problems similar to your own.

I am going to upgrade to an Intel Core2 6800 processor and this board looks suitable. 

i didn't manage to fix it yet, sadly. i'm still holding out, and haven't reformatted it yet, but i stuck the drive into another machine and it showed up the same way. i'll probably end up formatting it soon. :S at least there wasn't anything irreplaceable on it.

in anycase, i chose this board for a few reasons...

first, i wanted one that could do xfire. i haven't gone there yet, but i want the option, so that when i recover from this expenditure, i can pick up another video card and go crazy.

also, i'm kind of a pack rat when it comes to data, and i like to keep all my stuff quickly accessible on multiple hard drives, and not burn DVDs, so having support for 3 S-ATA HDDs was great, as well as the possibility of having 2 additional S-ATA HDDs (with asus 'ez-backup').
also, my last motherboard had a decidely short number of usb ports (2...)
now i can hook up the game pad, joystick, mouse, keyboard and my ipod along with other stuff like flash drives all at once.

finally, according to some reviews and from what i've been told, it's a good board for overclocking, and though i haven't done much yet, i was looking over the bios, and there seems to be quite a bit of freedom there.

if anyone's interested, i'm currently running:
core 2 duo e6300
asus p5w dh deluxe
1gb 800/pc6400
radeon 1950pro 256mb

this machine absolutely destroys some older games. WoW runs at 60-100+fps in most outdoor areas, and never dips below 30-40 in crowded areas (shattrath...), D3 (and other d3 engine games) are almost always maxed out at 60fps at highest settings (1024x768)

i have been having trouble with stalker though... i keep getting a lot of disk activity as if the game was running out of ram. it's actually worse performance than before... go figure. :P i may try again by installing it without the patch... we'll see.
runs the pc version of jade empire very smoothly too, although, it's kind of an older game.

haven't tried many newer games yet (they were all installed on the hdd that is giving me trouble, and haven't had the chance to reinstall everything). also really want to see how it handles oblivion with the dynamic lighting and huge outdoor areas with all the grass and stuff.


i do definatly recommend this board, if only because of all the features it has.
i'm sure you've read this, but in case you haven't: http://www.hothardware.com//viewarticle.aspx?articleid=863