I tried a KK400r as a possible upgrade from the XP333r. The
results were less than satisfactory under Windows 2000, but
under Windows 98 things seem OK. With Windows 98, you just
change the board and reboot. Windows 98 pulls in the new
drivers, asks you to reboot once or twice, and all is well.
You don't even have to dump and reload the RAID array.
With Windows 2000, things were different. First of all,
unless one removes the ALI drivers before changing to the
VIA board, the system won't boot. It is a bit of a struggle
to get it back. Even so, this causes the removal of all the
service packs and security patches, which are voluminous to
download and install. This is all moot if you eliminate the
problem in the beginning.
The real problem is that after getting the KK400r up and
running, my Windows 2000 now takes 3 or more minutes to
boot. It seems to be hanging on a file called IOMDISK.sys.
This driver is apparently installed at Windows 2000
installation if any ATAPI (IDE) Iomega hardware is found.
Once installed, there doesn't seem to be any way to get rid
of it. Of course, I could just reinstall Windows 2000
without the Iomega hardware. However, I just set up a new
Windows 2000 a few months ago. It was very time consuming
and I don't want to do it over.
A little inquiry revealed others having this problem. I
found a couple of registry hacks that either don't work or
render the system unbootable. Other suggestions, like
renaming iomdisk.sys, also render the machine unbootable.
There is supposedly some "timing problem" between the Iomega
driver and the Via chipset.
This just seems to me like another "Via hassle". The IDE Zip
drive worked fine with the ALI hardware. I am reminded of
the KT133 chipset board on which I had to rearrange the
cards until I found an IRQ sharing permutation that the
chipset "liked". In this case, I have a boot up problem I
can't fix.
My solution, for the time being, is to go back to the
pre-Via version of my Windows, and the ALI chipset
mainboard. Then I can put my Zip drive back and look for
another board that doesn't have a Via chipset.
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