A8N-SLI Deluxe/Premium thread - Page 55

**SubZero** · 09-07-2005, 07:56 AM

Are you booting from your RAID array or from that other SATA disk?

Anyway, you should be able to create a RAID disk from your ASUS CD. I'm surprised to hear you cannot create a disk on another system with that CD.

You are saying you can't boot of the XP disk? I guess you checked the bios and made sure the boot priority is right?

What happens when you press F8 during post and select you DVD/CD drive and try to boot from it? Make sure you press F6 during the XP installation to install the RAID drivers if you are booting from the raid-array. If you are not booting from it I think you don't need those drivers during installation. You do need them after setting up windows.

Quote:

Originally Posted by RangersFan

Bah, i'm stumped. The XP floppy boot disk i created ain't woking. Around disk 4 it's failing saying it can't find nvraid.sys even though I had loaded it just before off the driver disk i made.

Damn if only I could get it to boot from my XP sp2 disk i have.

RangersFan · 09-07-2005, 09:46 AM

all settings pertaining to boot priority and such are correct. the problem is for whatever reason no cd will boot from my cd drive. i am starting to worry it is damaged, even though bios detects it's model fine. what leads me to believe it was damaged is my 2nd optical drive a sony dvd burner no longer powers up, as well as the floppy. for a while when i powered on the computer it would just hang up and freeze at the post screen, until i removed both the dvd burner and floppy, and put in another floppy i knew is working. Now i am able to go into bios and everything, but when trying to boot up it won't boot from the cd nor the hard drives (even though there is no o/s on the drives), it just searching the floppy, thus i keep getting boot disk failure. Any way of testing my cd drives? The 2nd one won't even power on when connected so im pretty sure it's dead. But my main DVD/CD-R drive powers on and everything, get detected in bios as a sony drive, opens closes but apparently can't read discs it looks like. I guess tonight i will try using a different ide cable, if no go, i'll hook up an old cd-rom i have lying around. And i'll test the floppy out on another computer just to check.

Any ideas on how they could have gotten damaged? I'm usually careful pertaining to static shock and such, plus it pretty much looks as if everything else is fine, 3 hard drives, 2 video cards, sound card, motherboard.

Basically what i have done so far is got to microsoft.com and i downloaded an exe that allows you to create xp installation boot disks with 6 floppy's around the 4th floppy it starts saying it can't find nvraid.sys even though before disk 4 i already loaded in the 2 nvidia raid drivers from the nvraid disk i was able to make manually ( no it did not allow me to make it from the mobo cd on a different computer, i had tomake one manually by copying 4 files from a folder the chipsetdriver.exe extracted)

Pretty frustrated right now, as tinkering around in a tight mid tower, with lots of cables ain't fun for me, all the while trying to keep things neat. every time something goes wrong i have to go through tons a cables, zipped, tied and remove components then put them back and reattach all the cables, very annoying. I do love how my new case looks, but it is quite difficult to work inside it with the power cables, and 2 6800 ultras i have....i'll post pictures later of the clutter, which is considerably neater now since i spent a few hours last night reconnecting everything and zipping some wires up...

edit: and no it is not a slipstreamed sp2 disk. I have a full version windows xp pro sp2 disk

AHLnut · 09-07-2005, 10:29 AM

Does the light on your floppy drive always blink? If it does, the cable may be installed backwords. This could cause boot problems.

AHLnut · 09-07-2005, 10:35 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by JimTram

LOL, Thanks. How is the new card doing and which version did you get?

ASUS is supposed to be coming out with a newer version of the A8N SLI board:

http://www.asus.com/news_show.aspx?id=1304

I bought the cheapest Extreme music one. So far, it does sound great. I haven't listened to music enough to tell if it sounds better than the Audigy 2. I can tell ya though, playing BF 2 last night with the X-fi selected for audio sure was SWEET!!!

Really though, I'm not sure if it's worth it yet to upgrade from an Audigy 2 card. However, if you need a sound card and are going to buy one, I would recommend this one!

JimTram · 09-07-2005, 05:34 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by JCNiest5

That link shows nothing. Just a blank Asus page.

It seems to be working now.

http://www.asus.com/news_show.aspx?id=1304

JimTram · 09-07-2005, 05:41 PM

Thanks - I just may order that when I build my AMD system. I was going to order the board last night till I ran into the press release about the new A8N32-SLI Deluxe. It should knock the prices down on the current crop of boards. I want to do it fast as I may ebay my P4 rig piece by piece while its still worth something.

A8N32-SLI Deluxe
- AMD Athlon 64 FX/Athlon 64 X2/Athlon 64 / Sempron
- NVIDIA GeForce™ 6150 and NVIDIA nForce 4 SLI
- 2000/1600 MT/s System Bus
- 4 x DIMM, max. 4GB, DDR 400/333/266
- 2 x PCIe x16 (running @ x16 speed), 1 x PCIe x4, 3 x PCI 2.2
- Dual Gigabit LAN
- 6 x Serial ATA 3 GB/s ports including 1 external port
- 2 x IEEE 1394a
- ASUS two-slot thermal design
- ASUS Stack Cool 2

Quote:

Originally Posted by AHLnut

I bought the cheapest Extreme music one. So far, it does sound great. I haven't listened to music enough to tell if it sounds better than the Audigy 2. I can tell ya though, playing BF 2 last night with the X-fi selected for audio sure was SWEET!!!

Really though, I'm not sure if it's worth it yet to upgrade from an Audigy 2 card. However, if you need a sound card and are going to buy one, I would recommend this one!

RangersFan · 09-07-2005, 08:58 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by AHLnut

Does the light on your floppy drive always blink? If it does, the cable may be installed backwords. This could cause boot problems.

Nothing is connected incorrectly, and I have already removed the defective floppy and put in a working one.

RangersFan · 09-07-2005, 10:56 PM

Alright just confirmed that the dvd/cr-r was malfunctioning, as I just hooked up an old cd-rom and I finally got to the blue xp setup screen. Sonuva B!tch! How did all those drives get damaged? They were all connected together via the same power cable, could that have had something to do with it? This sucks, a DVD/CD-RW, a DVD+/-RW, and a Floppy, all fooked up.

BTW can anyone confirm which files I have to copy to a floppy to create a nvraid driver disk? I currently an unable to create a floppy off the motherboard cd.

Slippery · 09-08-2005, 12:25 AM

The floppy raid disk files are;disk1, idecoi.dll, nvata.cat, nvatabus.inf, nvatabus.sys, nvcoi.dll, nvide.nvu, nvraid.cat, nvraid.inf, nvraid.sys, nvraidco.dll, nvuide.exe, txtsetup.oem. 13 files.
I have seen at least 4 threads about optical drives not working with various bios' and this board. Your opticals may not be damaged, just not compatible with this board. I didn't know that when I built. Guess I just got lucky with a Sony floppy and Ben Q combo dvd.
FYI: If you intend to upgrade to the latest bios (1013 final), ASUS has warnings that you should upgrade to the latest chipset drivers FIRST. The 6.65's(for WinXP pro 32 bit) are the ones you want, not the 6.66. They zipped them with winrar. There is no exe to create a raid floppy, you have to know the above list to extract and make the disk. You have to start the install with this disk, the chipset drivers program will not upgrade the raid drivers. It can only be done at the initial "press F6 and put the floppy disk in point"!
Also, FWIW, I do not install the IDE drivers and do not use the firewall or network management. I use the NV4 nic because it works better than the marvel if you don't use their firewall.

RangersFan · 09-08-2005, 02:58 AM

Was having a lot of trouble trying to get the O/S to install on the NVRAID drives, kept getting an error during setup. So I just gave up for the time being and temporarily installed the O/S onto one of the raptors. Gonna try again tomorrow

RangersFan · 09-08-2005, 05:10 AM

Sigh, FINALLY! Decided to stay up all night, and call in sick to work tomorrow. Well i was playing around ever since I installed xp temporarily on one of the raptors, and decided let me make another nvraid driver disk, this time with the mobo cd, since now it'll allow me to make it. Finally the setup didn't crash, and now it's formatting my raptors which are striped. Whew. But I still have 2 dead optical drives. *** am I gonna do? Does SONY have warranty's? I mean both ****ing drives died, which sucks ***. I am working with an 8x Hitachi CD-ROM from 1996 right now. Where as my SONY drives were a 52x32x52x16x\CD-RW/DVD, and a 16x DVD+/-RW Double Layer Burner. I tested them on another computer. The DVD/CD-RW gets detected, but it cannot read any cd's or dvds, and the DVD+/-RW is totally dead and will not power on at all. I am still wondering how they got damaged. Could static shock do such a thing? I mean no other components are damaged, not even the floppy which I thought was, it's working now.

RangersFan · 09-08-2005, 09:29 AM

Finally up and running, with most critical drivers and programs installed. Just without the 2 defective optical drives. Everything looks solid right now. Just uploaded a few pics I've taken the past few days during this annoying ordeal.

Here it is with everything connected, during one of the several times I had to drag it over to my work table to disconnect and reconnect, then bring it over to my computer desk hook up everything turn it on and pray.

A better look inside, of the jungle I would have to deal with each and everytime it failed to boot up or setup. This is at it's neatest, it was much messier the first time I hooked everything up. The most annoying thing if u look closely is the jumble of sata wires and sata power cables all push up against the bottom 6800Ultra. I always have to check to make sure none of the sata power cables have not come loose. Plus I had to disconnect everything down there several times including the video card and sound card, to reach the connections to the sata controllers as well as clearing the cmos.

Ahhhhhh, the ****ing culprits! Damn you, for giving me so much agita. Hopefully i'll be able to swing some warranty BS for at least one of the drives.

Old School 8x Hitachi to the rescue!

SUCCESS! Beautiful blue setup screen.

That's the only pics I took, the rest of it afterwards was time consuming. Because of corrupted NVRaid driver disk, and incorrectly made ones (thanks nvidia knowledge base), I installed XP temporarily onto 1 WD Raptor (non raid array setup), just so I could insert the mobo CD and make a driver disk on the rig. And it worked. After I created the disk. I reformatted, setup my array (striped), re-installed successfully with my newly created nvraid driver disk, and now here I being able to type this post.

RangersFan · 09-08-2005, 11:12 AM

Wow, didn't realize ide optical drives are so cheap these days. Just reordered the same 2 drives for $68 total from newegg.

JoeBar · 09-08-2005, 11:59 AM

Nice case setup RangersFan!

**SubZero** · 09-08-2005, 01:03 PM

Congratz rangersfan! Enjoy!

09-07-2005, 09:46 AM	#812
RangersFan Registered User Join Date: Feb 2001 Location: New York Posts: 447	all settings pertaining to boot priority and such are correct. the problem is for whatever reason no cd will boot from my cd drive. i am starting to worry it is damaged, even though bios detects it's model fine. what leads me to believe it was damaged is my 2nd optical drive a sony dvd burner no longer powers up, as well as the floppy. for a while when i powered on the computer it would just hang up and freeze at the post screen, until i removed both the dvd burner and floppy, and put in another floppy i knew is working. Now i am able to go into bios and everything, but when trying to boot up it won't boot from the cd nor the hard drives (even though there is no o/s on the drives), it just searching the floppy, thus i keep getting boot disk failure. Any way of testing my cd drives? The 2nd one won't even power on when connected so im pretty sure it's dead. But my main DVD/CD-R drive powers on and everything, get detected in bios as a sony drive, opens closes but apparently can't read discs it looks like. I guess tonight i will try using a different ide cable, if no go, i'll hook up an old cd-rom i have lying around. And i'll test the floppy out on another computer just to check. Any ideas on how they could have gotten damaged? I'm usually careful pertaining to static shock and such, plus it pretty much looks as if everything else is fine, 3 hard drives, 2 video cards, sound card, motherboard. Basically what i have done so far is got to microsoft.com and i downloaded an exe that allows you to create xp installation boot disks with 6 floppy's around the 4th floppy it starts saying it can't find nvraid.sys even though before disk 4 i already loaded in the 2 nvidia raid drivers from the nvraid disk i was able to make manually ( no it did not allow me to make it from the mobo cd on a different computer, i had tomake one manually by copying 4 files from a folder the chipsetdriver.exe extracted) Pretty frustrated right now, as tinkering around in a tight mid tower, with lots of cables ain't fun for me, all the while trying to keep things neat. every time something goes wrong i have to go through tons a cables, zipped, tied and remove components then put them back and reattach all the cables, very annoying. I do love how my new case looks, but it is quite difficult to work inside it with the power cables, and 2 6800 ultras i have....i'll post pictures later of the clutter, which is considerably neater now since i spent a few hours last night reconnecting everything and zipping some wires up... edit: and no it is not a slipstreamed sp2 disk. I have a full version windows xp pro sp2 disk Last edited by RangersFan : 09-07-2005 at 09:52 AM.
(Offline)

09-07-2005, 10:29 AM	#813
AHLnut Registered User Join Date: Sep 2002 Location: Virginia Posts: 1,124	Does the light on your floppy drive always blink? If it does, the cable may be installed backwords. This could cause boot problems. __________________ System 1 Asus A8N-SLI Premium - AMD X2 3800+ - OCZ 2x1GB EL Platinum - 2 BFG 7800GT OC in SLI - Soundblaster X-Fi - 2 36 GB Raptor in Raid 0 - WD 400KD - WD 250JB - Plextor PS-716A - Plextor 48x24x48 - Antec Neo-Power 480 - Antec Super Lanboy - WinXP Pro SP2. System 2 Abit IC7 - 3.0C Intel CPU - 2x512 Geil Golden Dragon DDR433 - BFG 6800 GT OC - WD 200JB - Seagate 200GB 7200.7 - 3COM 905CX-TXNM NIC(PCI 2) - Audigy 2(PCI 3) - Plextor PX-708A DVD+- RW combo drive - Plextor 48x24x48 CD-RW drive - Antec 3700BQE case with TP430 PSU - XP SP2 slipstreamed.
(Offline)

09-07-2005, 10:56 PM	#818
RangersFan Registered User Join Date: Feb 2001 Location: New York Posts: 447	Alright just confirmed that the dvd/cr-r was malfunctioning, as I just hooked up an old cd-rom and I finally got to the blue xp setup screen. Sonuva B!tch! How did all those drives get damaged? They were all connected together via the same power cable, could that have had something to do with it? This sucks, a DVD/CD-RW, a DVD+/-RW, and a Floppy, all fooked up. BTW can anyone confirm which files I have to copy to a floppy to create a nvraid driver disk? I currently an unable to create a floppy off the motherboard cd.
(Offline)

09-08-2005, 12:25 AM	#819
Slippery Registered User Join Date: Mar 2003 Posts: 104	The floppy raid disk files are;disk1, idecoi.dll, nvata.cat, nvatabus.inf, nvatabus.sys, nvcoi.dll, nvide.nvu, nvraid.cat, nvraid.inf, nvraid.sys, nvraidco.dll, nvuide.exe, txtsetup.oem. 13 files. I have seen at least 4 threads about optical drives not working with various bios' and this board. Your opticals may not be damaged, just not compatible with this board. I didn't know that when I built. Guess I just got lucky with a Sony floppy and Ben Q combo dvd. FYI: If you intend to upgrade to the latest bios (1013 final), ASUS has warnings that you should upgrade to the latest chipset drivers FIRST. The 6.65's(for WinXP pro 32 bit) are the ones you want, not the 6.66. They zipped them with winrar. There is no exe to create a raid floppy, you have to know the above list to extract and make the disk. You have to start the install with this disk, the chipset drivers program will not upgrade the raid drivers. It can only be done at the initial "press F6 and put the floppy disk in point"! Also, FWIW, I do not install the IDE drivers and do not use the firewall or network management. I use the NV4 nic because it works better than the marvel if you don't use their firewall. __________________ EVGA 680i SLI C2D 6600@3.3/ Thermaltake BT OCZ DDR2PC6400 XTC Plat/2X1024 EVGA 8800 GTX 2 RAPTOR 74 RAID 0 Seagate 250 SATA BENQ DW1625 XFi Xtreme Gamer OCZ Gamestream 700w Silverstone tj09b NEC 22in Last edited by Slippery : 09-08-2005 at 12:38 AM.
(Offline)

09-08-2005, 02:58 AM	#820
RangersFan Registered User Join Date: Feb 2001 Location: New York Posts: 447	Was having a lot of trouble trying to get the O/S to install on the NVRAID drives, kept getting an error during setup. So I just gave up for the time being and temporarily installed the O/S onto one of the raptors. Gonna try again tomorrow
(Offline)

09-08-2005, 05:10 AM	#821
RangersFan Registered User Join Date: Feb 2001 Location: New York Posts: 447	Sigh, FINALLY! Decided to stay up all night, and call in sick to work tomorrow. Well i was playing around ever since I installed xp temporarily on one of the raptors, and decided let me make another nvraid driver disk, this time with the mobo cd, since now it'll allow me to make it. Finally the setup didn't crash, and now it's formatting my raptors which are striped. Whew. But I still have 2 dead optical drives. * am I gonna do? Does SONY have warranty's? I mean both ing drives died, which sucks *. I am working with an 8x Hitachi CD-ROM from 1996 right now. Where as my SONY drives were a 52x32x52x16x\CD-RW/DVD, and a 16x DVD+/-RW Double Layer Burner. I tested them on another computer. The DVD/CD-RW gets detected, but it cannot read any cd's or dvds, and the DVD+/-RW is totally dead and will not power on at all. I am still wondering how they got damaged. Could static shock do such a thing? I mean no other components are damaged, not even the floppy which I thought was, it's working now.
(Offline)

09-08-2005, 09:29 AM	#822
RangersFan Registered User Join Date: Feb 2001 Location: New York Posts: 447	Finally up and running, with most critical drivers and programs installed. Just without the 2 defective optical drives. Everything looks solid right now. Just uploaded a few pics I've taken the past few days during this annoying ordeal. Here it is with everything connected, during one of the several times I had to drag it over to my work table to disconnect and reconnect, then bring it over to my computer desk hook up everything turn it on and pray. A better look inside, of the jungle I would have to deal with each and everytime it failed to boot up or setup. This is at it's neatest, it was much messier the first time I hooked everything up. The most annoying thing if u look closely is the jumble of sata wires and sata power cables all push up against the bottom 6800Ultra. I always have to check to make sure none of the sata power cables have not come loose. Plus I had to disconnect everything down there several times including the video card and sound card, to reach the connections to the sata controllers as well as clearing the cmos. Ahhhhhh, the ***ing culprits! Damn you, for giving me so much agita. Hopefully i'll be able to swing some warranty BS for at least one of the drives. Old School 8x Hitachi to the rescue! SUCCESS! Beautiful blue setup screen. That's the only pics I took, the rest of it afterwards was time consuming. Because of corrupted NVRaid driver disk, and incorrectly made ones (thanks nvidia knowledge base), I installed XP temporarily onto 1 WD Raptor (non raid array setup), just so I could insert the mobo CD and make a driver disk on the rig. And it worked. After I created the disk. I reformatted, setup my array (striped), re-installed successfully with my newly created nvraid driver disk, and now here I being able to type this post. Last edited by RangersFan : 09-09-2005 at 12:18 PM.*
(Offline)

09-08-2005, 11:12 AM	#823
RangersFan Registered User Join Date: Feb 2001 Location: New York Posts: 447	Wow, didn't realize ide optical drives are so cheap these days. Just reordered the same 2 drives for $68 total from newegg.
(Offline)

09-08-2005, 11:59 AM	#824
JoeBar Bite me if u can... Join Date: Sep 2002 Location: Athens Posts: 5,889	Nice case setup RangersFan! __________________ Asus P5WDG2 Premium rev. 1.02G Intel Pentium D 920 SL94S Malay @ 4.31GHz cooled by Thermaltake Big Water 745 GeCube Radeon X1900XT combined with LG 1980Q (8ms) 19' TFT monitor 2 x 1GB Transcend DDR2-533 @ 770mhz 2 x 36.7GB Western Digital Raptors Raid 0 \| 300GB Western Digital Caviar SE SATA Creative Soundblaster X-Fi Xtrememusic combined with Cambridge Soundworks Megaworks 550 THX Asus E616P3 DVD \| Asus 1608-P DVD-RW Thermaltake Kandalf black super tower with 4 x 120mm and 2 x 90mm blue led fans \| Chieftec 550W Triple 12V rails - 120mm fan
(Offline)

09-08-2005, 01:03 PM	#825
SubZero Moderator Join Date: Feb 2001 Location: Below sealevel Posts: 9,665	Congratz rangersfan! Enjoy! __________________ Main Rig: Asus P5K \| Intel Core Quad Q6600 \| Corsair XMS 6400-4gig eVGA GeForce 8800 GTX KO ACS3 \| X-Fi ExtremeMusic \| Z-5500D OCZ GameXstream 850W \| ThermalTake Aguila \| Logitech G-15 Logitech MX1000 \| Synology DS-207+ NAS (2x500WD-SATA2-RAID0)
(Offline)

Thread Tools
Show Printable Version Email this Page
Display Modes
Linear Mode Switch to Hybrid Mode Switch to Threaded Mode