VIA acknowledge problem
At least VIA Germany does
The KT133A problem, as it's now known, which causes corrupted data during large file transfers from one ATA100 device to another, and is aggravated by the presence of an SB Live! PCI card, has finally prompted a response from VIA themselves. Confirming the problems (in German, hence the absence of direct quotes), the company said that there is a potential IDE DMA problem with the VIA Southbridge 686B, on KT133A motherboard platforms. The company has erected a board list page with appropriate BIOS updates, and promises updates for boards not yet ready to be available soon. Since we have a few ATA100 devices and an ABit KT7A-RAID currently running on the testbed, we thought we'd conduct our own test to see whether we could reproduce the problem. Sure enough, with or without our SB Live! installed, transferring a 125Mb file from a 15Gb IBM Deskstar 'Telesto' 75GXP drive running at ATA100 to a 20Gb IBM Deskstar 'Ericson' drive running at ATA100 caused some horrible whirring noises and a corrupted file on receipt. Windows 2000 didn't like it at all. Applying the beta patch from ABit's public FTP and performing the transfer again yielded no errors. As stated before, our advice is not to flash your BIOS unless you suffer from this problem directly. Doing so is a tedious process and a bit nerve-wracking. If you do intend to go through with it, just make sure you follow the instructions provided implicitly. Good luck. Related Feature - April's Marching Motherboards