thornsword

I do indeed have a Raid BIOS v. 4.84, although I'm using the 704-2 Beta Bios instead of the official BIOS 623-3 I've found the beta bios to be more stable for me. But don't get me started on how I had to loosen my RAM timings just to get stability when I wasn't even overclocking. I used to get blue screens a lot, STOP errors or IRQL errors until I adjusted my RAM timings. I left memtest run for hours and I would only get errors in tests 5 and 8 and I read somewhere that those were do to timings. But thats all behind me now. Now that my system is stable I decided I would try for the next experiment: RAID. The SATAII RAID hardrive setup has been giving me headaches too, but I look at these things as a challenge. I reinstalled windows over the weekend with my slipstreamed nLite CD following Fernando's instructions to the letter and it worked like a charm. Thanks, Fernando! If only that were the end of things, but its not without new problems too, I now have that annoying "safely remove hardware" icon in the task bar, and I have some unknown devices in device manager that I'm pretty sure weren't there when I used the RAID drivers from the set included posted on DFI's nF4 page. The one I'm most concerned about is a PCI Bridge device, which I assume is related to SLI. But I only have one graphics card right now. Incidently those drivers that I used previsously are the same ones that Reinvented is talking about. They aren't new, the drivers have dates from 2004, but the .zip file was posted on 2006/1/23. I'm going to try to fix the issues above tonight and I'll post here with my results.

From Fernando (as I don't know how to add a quote like you guys do) ----------------- Hi Thornsword, thank you for the flowers! You are right - I have very similar hardware as you have (my DFI Lanparty NF4 is the best board I ever had). What was it, what you have edited by hand? It's a while ago, that people needed to do some "handmade" editing. Since nLite 1.0 RC1everything works automaticly, if you follow my guide. At least a tip: The Raid driver you have downloaded from DFI homepage is a very old version from 2004. You should update the SataRaid drivers by a newer version (off the 6.70 package). CU Fernando ------------------- After meticiously re-reading the first post I think my issues came about when I tried to integrate the \NVIDIA\nForceWin2KXP\6.70\IDE\WinXP\sataraid folder without first moving the files below as listed in your first post: 1) Open the LEGACY subfolder and copy the file NVATABUS.INF into the SATARAID subfolder. 2) Open the SATA_IDE subfolder and copy the files NVATA.CAT, NVIDE.NVU and NVCOI.DLL into the SATARAID subfolder. Now your SATARAID subfolder of the 6.70 package is well prepared for the later integration of the SataRaid drivers I was sure your method was not working for me as I was still getting the random reboots even after integrating the drivers from sataraid folder. I wish I had noticed before that I was missing the step to move those files. My apologies for not being as careful a reader as I should have been, if I had caught that I probablly could have saved myself several hours of frustration as I went to download other revisions of the Nvidia drivers and try to integrate them! You are right to say the drivers dfi posted on thier website for the LANparty nF4 SLI-DR are old drivers from 2004, but I think the Windows XP install worked for me with these drivers because all the files that I needed (the ones I would have moved as stated in your first post) were already in the same directory. Its curious that dfi would post a new RAID driver on 2006/01/27. but have those drivers be time stamped at 2004/12. I will re-try the method you list in your first post as soon as I am home from work. I'll post here with my new results, although I'm pretty sure I will be sucessful now that I see where my apparant mistake was.

Hi Fernando, I just wanted to say thanks for taking the time to create this guide and still tend it attentivly. Creating the RAID was easy enough and I made sure I had the 4.84 RAID Bios. The system reported it as healthy. Setting up RAID using a floppy and the F6 method would never work for me. I would get the symptom of the endless reboots at the end of a seemingly sucessful XP GUI install. I think I remember seeing that you are a DFI nF4 LANparty SLI-DR user. That's what I have as well and I tried following your guide for using nLite to integrate the Nvidia RAID drivers. I think I was doing that part right but I would always be confused as to what file, if any I needed to modify (edit by hand in a text editor) Well, in frustration, I re-checked DFI's website for the motherboard and they had posted on 2006/01/27 a new RAID driver. http://us.dfi.com.tw/Support/Download/driv..._FLAG=A&SITE=NA I used nLite RC 1.06 to intergrate the driver DFI posted there and it worked without needing to do any further modification! I don't know how these files are different, (because I tried the driver from Nvidia and the old ones from DFI and they would give me the endless reboots too. I can only guess that somehow these drivers have some portion of the code re-written, or differently called, or that infact the drivers are now properly WHQL certified. Just thought I would bring this to your attention. my system: DFI nF4 LANparty SLI-DR 2x200 Samsung Spinpoint SATA 3.0g in RAID0 (finally, yeah!) IDE DVD burner etc nLite XP pro with slipstreamed SP2 integrated RAID drivers Thanks again, without this forum I never would have gotten this far!