Driver update: VIA 686B data corruption bug fix

VIA itself hasn’t done it yet, but a reader of VIAHardware.com has a fix made for the infamous data corruption bug in the VIA 686B southbridge. The problems occur when a large file (greater than 100MB) is copied from one hard drive to another while they are attached to different IDE controllers. At that point, the computer may spontaneously lock up. The problem seems to be common when using a SoundBlaster Live! sound card.

If the aforementioned issues are familiar to you, you can download this fix. The driver you install with this only adjusts some things when Windows starts up, so you won’t have any ‘burden’ from it.

This is a driver for Windows 9X, NT, and 200X. It is intended to stabilize the PCI bus of computers that have Via chipsets.

This driver takes control of the main VIA-branded chip on the computers’ motherboard, which is the chip responsible for connecting the CPU to the RAM and ROM and PCI and AGP and so forth. This driver adjusts the way that the VIA chip communicates with the computer’s PCI bus.