FatalSaviour

Yeah, as a bonus -- the vacuum cleaner will sometimes generate a huge static charge. Then all your problems will be over. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Yep, was just about to mention this myself. Cleaning with a vacuum can be a very costly exercise, due to above reason (probably more damage than the car wash idea tbh - At least it'll dry). Just go for a bit of compressed air.

Not quite I'm afraid. SATA is slightly faster than IDE, 150Mbs vs 133. External data transfer rates make hardly any real-world difference anyway, I can only begin to see this with the 16mb cache I have on 2 maxtor's I own. As for SCSI, it can own SATA, especially as many SCSI drives are optimzed for servers running at 10k or 15k rpm, which (with the exception of the WD Raptors) is a hell of a lot faster than any SATA drive out there. Anyway, this seems to be digressing. Is it possible to buy a new mainboard, I know you said it was a rackmount, and I'm not sure on the exact possibilities with, eg. an Nforce 4 Intel Edition, but I pretty sure that it is possible to span arrays across the PATA and SATA controllers integrated on the board. Probably not such a great idea, but just a thought....

Good post InTheWayBoy. I don't know what 2 of the people on this thread are talking about....but I think you've summed up the main features that most people miss. Just to be clear about Remote Desktop, you can use XP Home to remotely connect to an XP Pro PC, but not vice versa. Personally, I find XPHome a bit claustraphobic and frustrating, but I agree that for most people, it's perfectly adequate. Just another small point, you can only get an x64 version of Professional, there are no plans to release a Home version AFAIK?

Does nlite copy that folder then, even if you just point it to the Ethernet driver? You learn something new every day.

Very strange, because that's exactly what I did, as mentioned, without modifying the Txtsetup.oem, or creating an OEM dir, yet, windows works absolutely lovely...up to the occasional restart. Checking in device manager, all drivers provided by nvidia, and all seem ok. Have you tried an install of the drivers in safe mode yet wooosh?

Hmmm, very bizarre. I'm afraid I can't be much help for now (It's 2am here now and I've done 40miles of cycling today...) but I'll just contribute a little... Should there be any nvidia related bits in Sound, Game etc.? Certainly not sound I should imagine, Nvidia didn't incorportate sound into the NForce4 did they, I know on the Asus and most other makes, (all apart from MSI I believe) Realtek 850 codecs were used, so I would start by not integrating them. (AFAIK anyway - please correcy/flame me if I'm wrong). When you try and integrate the E'net drivers, does nlite add them, but when you come to install windows, they've disappeared, or does nlite complain from the start. For me, it was just a simple case of integrate, et voila! they worked. Certainly when you come to install the driver package in windows, you should be able to get these installed. Have you tried installing them in safe mode?

I cannot find a special option to remove the IDE drivers by nLite. There was only a combination of SCSI drivers and something else and I removed that combination. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> The IDE drivers can be removed individually in nLite's HARDWARE section (not in the DRIVERS section). So I guess I'm the only one with this "Unknown Device" issue in Device Manager, huh? WTF am I doing wrong? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Wooosh, what board have you got. I believe you've posted it somewhere, and I think it may have been an A8N-sli deluxe, but I may just be making that up... If so, is that the only unknown device that you have in the system. If you right click, properties etc. and go to the device ID, what's the string that it gives you there? My current train of thought is that it's nothing to do with the RAID array, and it's the ATK 0110 Acpi Utility, the driver for which is part of Asus's AI overclock software (you don't have to install it all, just extract it and point windows to the driver). However, I may have got this all wrong, and just gone off on another of my ramblings... BTW, I'm well aware that this has nothing to do with SATA, RAID, or any serious device issues for that matter. Do you have any 'known' devices showing in device manager, namely Nvidia nForce RAID Class Controller and Nvidia nForce4 Serial ATA RAID Controller. If so, that should be your lot and it wouldn't surprise me if windows has placed the Acpi Utility there just to play silly b*ggers with you. Hope this is of some help

I see both POVs. For me, removing all other IDE drivers seems like a harmless exercise, if I'm going to install a new board, then it's likely I'll format and use a fresh version of windows. With the A8N-sli deluxe, it's unlikely I'll ever need any more storage controllers, so I'm not going to miss them. For people that don't know what they're doing however, I suppose it could lead to problems, removing more than necessary, dependencies on other system devices. IDE controller drivers are one of the things I'd feel very comfortable removing, it's almost a dead cert you won't be needing them in the future. Is there any disadvantage at all of removing them?

Btw, I completely sympathise with you woosh. It seems that no (semi) cutting edge system that I put together these days is completely problem free. It's rather annoying....

I think Dr Tweak means that he just changed the name of the .inf file.

Ok, some information that may be useful to you then: It's an Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe (nForce 4 SLI chipset), and the raid array is a RAID 0 SATA with 2x 80gig Seagate 7200.7s. I'm using the 1013 bios, which has the nvraid 4.84 bios. I didn't remove any drivers with nLite, not MS or any others. I used Forceware AMD 6.66 (32-bit). I integrated the SATAraid subfolder for the Textmode driver. I made no modification to the driver subfolder (I was going to edit the Txtsetup.oem as you suggested, but thought it looked like a bit too much hassle, and thought I'd give it a whirl and see if it worked without editing first. I can't quite remember, but I'm 90% sure I just pointed nlite to the Sata_ide drivers first, and then the Sataraid drivers 2nd (I need both sets, as I also have a Maxtor 250gig on the 3rd controller for storage). I did select all the options on nlite, tweaking etc. but for the most part I left these unchanged and just skipped past them. I added my cd key, network name etc. but didn't make any huge changes. Just let me know if I can provide any more information other than this. On a side note, is there a way to get rid of the US language, and just install the UK bits? I can add the UK, and tell it to use it, but I can't seem to find the US language to remove in nlite. I'm thinking it uses the US language during install, but I'd like to remove it if possible.

Thx for the reply Fernando. Is it not everyone getting this exact same problem then? It's very bizarre - without making any handmade changes - simply slipstreaming SP2 onto an original XP source folder, adding's Ryan's latest updates, and then integrating all the nvidia drivers (E'net, SATA, RAID etc), I seem to have a perfectly healthy OS at the end of installation (give or take the odd random reboot). I stress however that I can go through hours and hours of games, putting my CPU at full load almost constantly, yet the system's perfectly stable. Just letting it idle however will indefinitely result in a crash at some point, usually within a couple of hours. Update: For some reason, when transcoding avi's using Nero VisionExpress to put to DVD, it can never complete a DVD, whenever I get back to the machine, 1.5 hours later or so, it's rebooted itself. I'm not 100% sure whether this is related to the initial reboots you guys seem to be having or not. Not sure how you guys diagnose these things exactly, if it helps, i can post my presets etc, both for those of you that can't get you're systems to work, and for me, who's fondly remembering the days I last had a stable system...it was a AMD XP 2000+, with a known faulty 512mb of RAM, which didn't bother it in the least, and an FX5200. Oh the memories...

Could someone please clarify what errors they're actually getting when they try to slipstream SATA NVRAID array drivers into an WinXP SP2 (32-bit) cd. Without making any text-mode modifications, simply using nlite to integrate the drivers, windows appears to have installed fine, and I can run apps, games etc. all day long. However, upon leaving it, sometimes immediately after booting, sometimes 3 hours after...it randomly reboots. Is this the constant rebooting that people are having problems with, or is it straight after booting XP that most people find their PCs flaking out? Cheers