” VIA has confirmed a data-damaging glitch in its 686B
Southbridge chip – a major part of the Taiwanese company’s KT-133A
chipset – and is working with mobo makers to prepare BIOS updates
to fix the problem.”
“The southbridge part is used in the vast majority of AMD
Athlon-oriented mobos, primarily the KT-133, but it can be used
with northbridge parts from the Apollo Pro 133, KX-133A and AMD-76x
chipsets too. VIA said it is investigating the problem to see how
many chipsets are affected.”
“The bug was uncovered by German hardware site Au-Ja! It’s not
exactly a common problem: the date corruption affects large, 100MB
and up file transfers between two hard drives connected to separate
IDE channels exchanging the data by DMA. Having a Creative Labs
Soundblaster Live card in place seems to exacerbate the
problem.”