jayhall0315

Sorry Dale, I did not mean to give credit to someone else for your work. For all the rest of you, I am attempting to get the source code from a contact in China at ASUS. I contacted Nvidia and they do not seem to give much of a **** wether the nForce community hangs in limbo (that is about 2,100, 000 nforce 4 motherboard purchases and counting). If my contact comes thru (a big "if"), I will attempt to rewrite the sataraid drivers and test them on my own systems. If I am successful and my coding works well, then I will release the new drivers here in the forums as a Beta release to test out. In the meantime, I encourage those who are still having problems to try the 6.67 drivers at www.guru3d.com. Stay tuned.......................

Attention to all thread users: The "unknown device" that is appearing for many of you in device manager (especially for those of you who have nforce 4 boards) is the ATK0110 APCI Util that is used to change the FSB with software like ASUS's AI Booster. To clear the problem, do the following: insert your motherboard driver cd or download the latest AI Booster from Asus. browse the cd and goto \software\aibooster\acpi64 and copy the win2000 folder to your desktop. open the win2000 folder on your desktop and open the file ATK2000.ini with Notepad. Look for this [Manufacturer] %ATK%=ATK [ATK] %DeviceDesc1%=DriverInstall,ACPI\ATK0110 and change it to this (bold text is only to show you what you have to change) [Manufacturer] %ATK%=ATK,NTamd64 [ATK.NTamd64] %DeviceDesc1%=DriverInstall,ACPI\ATK0110 save the file and then go to the unknown device in device manager and manually update the driver pointing it to the win2000 directory on your desktop. There should be no more problems. Also, even if you overclock, avoid ASUS's AI Booster and Nvidia's nTune. Short story is that they both suck and are alot like the 6.66 driver package, full of bugs.

I too, like many of you, have an ASUS a8n-sli deluxe motherboard (version 1.02) on which I am attempting to run raid using the Nvidia contoller (not the Silicon Image controller). I have been enduring problems up the wahzoo trying to get this motherboard to work with either nvidia reference drivers 6.66, asus drivers 6.65 for winXP 32 bit or BIOS version 1013 (version 6.53 works so so, but more on that in a minute). After about one week and a hundred permutations later, here are the results: BIOS versions 1001 to 1011 -> Fernandos OemInfFiles Method while very clever and a great step forward (thanks for posting your work, it has been a godsend) does not work. Changing the txtsetup.oem makes no difference. You may use nLite or you may take the F6 floppy route but the result is the same, endless reboots or blue screens. The reason as Fernando correctly points out, is that nvatabus.sys and nvraid.sys (found in nforce4_amd_6.66\ide\winxp\sataraid or pataraid) are not f*!$& WHQL by the Microsoft Gods. They are replaced during the GUI install portion of XP by generic Intel IDE drivers and this is what is causing the endless reboots/BSOD. The creation of an $OEM$ file system is not enough to override the generic IDE drivers that XP normally uses. Fernandos Driver Removal Method DOES work with BIOS 1008, 1009 and 1011 (sorry, not enough time to test all earlier versions) but YOU MUST ALSO enable the txtsetup.oem tweak mentioned in the OemInfFiles method. This method works only by the nLite method. The reason it works is that you are using nLite to remove all the generic IDE drivers so that during the GUI install portion of XP, XP can only see the Nvidia files. The irritation with this method is that you will be warned during setup and everytime in the future that you install drivers that XP has found a problem with incompatable drivers (the sataraid crap) that could damage your system. You will also find an annoying icon in the taskbar that continually asks you to uninstall your RAID system. I have also found other small problems (such as ASUS update 6.07 does not recognize my motherboard BIOS and device manager problems) and I am still testing. Basically, it works but I am a perfectionist so that crap drives me batty. BIOS version 1013 -> If you are one of the few lucky ones who thru sheer cussing, mountain dew binges and/or compulsion to rake your own eyeballs have updated the BIOS to 1013, then congratulate yourself, you are a Siddhartha of motherboards. The 1013 BIOS is a bit different from all previous versions because it includes specific changes that allow the Nvidia SataRaid controller to be recognized by the non-WHQLed nvatabus.sys and nvraid.sys files (this is done, I believe by sequencing at the machine code level, not at the C++ level). These changes take the place of the nvcchflt filter file found in the 6.53 drivers. Long story short, the OemInfFiles method DOES works and so does the Driver Removal Method (both using nLite). You still will have all the minor irritations I mentioned above though. It works, I believe, because the generic IDE drivers are now seeing the Nvraid controller as an ide extension. The easiest method with the least problems seems to be the OemInfFiles method but I am still testing. If you want to use the floppy method, go to the sataraid folder, copy in the nvatabus.inf from the pataraid folder, then change the nvraid.inf line to nvatabus.inf in the txtsetup.oem file, then copy all the sataraid folder to one floppy. I will be testing BIOS 1013 with 6.66 for the next few weeks and BIOS 1013 with version 6.53 drivers to see how it goes. BIOS version 1009 and 1011 work fine with Nvidia's reference drivers 6.53 because of the included filter file nvcchflt in the sataraid folder. You will still get the taskbar icon asking you to disable your RAID hardrives but just ignore it. Stay tuned... Please Note: I use an AMD X2 4800 and two of the four drives I worked with to get the above results have been Hitachi T7K-250s, which use the new SATA II standards (3 Gbps and NCQ)(that is part of the reason I wanted to use the Nvidia raid controller, which is made to work with SATA II, instead of the Silicon Image one). Using or not using dual core processors or SATA II makes no difference (as long as you use a BIOS version that recognizes dual core processors) reach me at jayhall0315@yahoo.com because I will most likely forget to post here often. (Homebuilt) X2 4800/ASUS a8n-sli deluxe/BFG 7800 GTX SLI/2 74 GB Raptors and 2 250 GB Hitachi T7K-250s/Creative X-FI Fata1tly/DangerDen watercooling/Plextor Burners/Dell 2405 FPW/PC Power and Cooling 850/Gigaworks S750