Nforce4 RAID wont' install on WinXP

  • Thread starter Thread starter Penelope Baker
  • Start date Start date
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Penelope Baker

Greetings:

I've been unsuccessfully trying to install NVRAID for the past day on my new
a8n-sli board. Here's a synopsis, any insight would be greatly appreciated.

System setup is 2 75GB SATA Raptors, in Nvidia RAID ports 1 and 2.

I have them set up in the NVRAID utility as a mirror, which is reported
healthy. I've made my driver disk from the motherboard CD. I boot off the XP
CD, and hit F6, installing both drivers as requested. When the blue and
white text based portion of the setup gets done installing all the
manufacturer drivers, and it says 'starting windows' just before it should
start copying files, the screen goes blank, the keyboard flashes, the screen
comes back on, and then it reboots.

I tried the same scenario with XP 64 bit and at the same time, I get a STOP
error that says something like 'machine check exception'.

If I remove the mirror and turn off NVRAID, I can install and run Windows
fine, on either drive. So the drives aren't hosed.

I have tried installing Windows, and THEN installing the drivers, and this
results in a lock at boot...with the Windows XP graphic loading logo stuck
in a sort of 1/4 lighted (very very dim) and a machine lock. Booting with
last known good config, fixes it.

I'd almost swear there's something conflicty w/ my vid card. Single PCIE
X300. No, I don't have anything else to test with. :-(

I've tried Nvidia RAID ports 3 and 4 with the same problem.

Help?

Thanks!!!

Peace,
Pen
 
Are you sure you are trying to load the 64 bit drivers and not the 32 bit
drivers?
The problem you describe would be what I would expect if the drivers loaded
by F6 were 32 bit.
- Tim
 
On Thu, 20 Jan 2005 09:15:38 -0500, "Penelope Baker"

I just installed winxp pro on same board 2 days ago. I have 2X250
SATA drives installed on Nvidia RAID 1&2. Be carefull that when you
create the drivers disk, you have to be in the
\Drivers\Chipset\WINXP_2K\Driver_Disk folder and then start
"Makedisk" this is for the Nvidia RAID. The support CD also has
the other RAID drivers here :\Drivers\Sil3114
 
I finally gave up and used the SI controller. When I did so, everything
went flawlessly. I think there's a hardware level conflict of some sorts
between the NVIDIA controller and my video card somewhere.

Harry said:
On Thu, 20 Jan 2005 09:15:38 -0500, "Penelope Baker"

I just installed winxp pro on same board 2 days ago. I have 2X250
SATA drives installed on Nvidia RAID 1&2. Be carefull that when you
create the drivers disk, you have to be in the
\Drivers\Chipset\WINXP_2K\Driver_Disk folder and then start
"Makedisk" this is for the Nvidia RAID. The support CD also has
the other RAID drivers here :\Drivers\Sil3114
Click to expand...
 
I had the same problem.
Turned out I had to use the Kingston 1-gig ram sticks shown in the manual.
These boards won't take any old ram.
It would fail to copy files during windows setup...like a dirty cd.
Previously I thought ram errors always resulted in BSOD.....not file copy
errors.
Live & learn.
Also noted the Win64 install driver disk is missing the *.cat files.
Just hit ESC & it will install fine.


Penelope Baker said:
I finally gave up and used the SI controller. When I did so, everything
went flawlessly. I think there's a hardware level conflict of some sorts
between the NVIDIA controller and my video card somewhere.
Click to expand...
 
Greetings:

I've been unsuccessfully trying to install NVRAID for the past day on
my new a8n-sli board. Here's a synopsis, any insight would be greatly
appreciated.

System setup is 2 75GB SATA Raptors, in Nvidia RAID ports 1 and 2.

I have them set up in the NVRAID utility as a mirror, which is
reported healthy. I've made my driver disk from the motherboard CD. I
boot off the XP CD, and hit F6, installing both drivers as requested.
When the blue and white text based portion of the setup gets done
installing all the manufacturer drivers, and it says 'starting
windows' just before it should start copying files, the screen goes
blank, the keyboard flashes, the screen comes back on, and then it
reboots.

I tried the same scenario with XP 64 bit and at the same time, I get a
STOP error that says something like 'machine check exception'.

If I remove the mirror and turn off NVRAID, I can install and run
Windows fine, on either drive. So the drives aren't hosed.

I have tried installing Windows, and THEN installing the drivers, and
this results in a lock at boot...with the Windows XP graphic loading
logo stuck in a sort of 1/4 lighted (very very dim) and a machine
lock. Booting with last known good config, fixes it.

I'd almost swear there's something conflicty w/ my vid card. Single
PCIE X300. No, I don't have anything else to test with. :-(

I've tried Nvidia RAID ports 3 and 4 with the same problem.

Help?

Thanks!!!

Peace,
Pen
Click to expand...

I had this same maddening problem during one of my WinXP reinstalls.
For me, it turned out to be that the floppy I used as the Nvidia RAID
driver disk was going bad. What was happening is that the driver was
corrupt because of read errors on the floppy. But, during Windows setup
when it reads from the floppy, it doesn't seem to be very smart about
read integrity, and wasn't giving any errors. Reading the same floppy,
on the same drive, under WinXP gave many read errors, but during setup
it must have just faithfully copied the bad data with no complaints...

Note that I also used RAM specifically mentioned in the manual...
 
I ran into the same problem, simply by finishing the raid setup in bios
(F10) incomplete. So maybe you should check the raid setup in bios.
 
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