Terminus

I recently got all the parts for my new system: Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe AMD Athon 64 X2 4200+ Corsair XMS 2GB - TWINX2048-3500LLPRO (2x) Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD3200KS 320GB 3.0Gb/s SATA Drives XFX PVT70FUND7 GeForce 7800GTX 256MB Enermax Liberty ELT620AWT ATX12V 620W Power Supply Sony Black 16X DVD-ROM 48X CD-ROM - IDE Sony Black IDE DVD Burner (DW-Q30A BK) I tried installing XP Pro x64 using the F6 driver diskette method, using drivers I had on the CD that came with the motherboard, from NVidia, from various on-line sites, like planetamd64.com ... NONE of the drivers for the NVidia RAID stuff lets me get past the "Setup is starting Windows" screen. I tried the instructions in the first post of this thread, downloading the 6.83 Package, then downloading the 6.67 package and coping the files. Then I slipstreamed (nLite is pretty slick!) the drivers into a new install disk, and it once again sits at the "Setup is starting Windows" screen again. I guess my next steps are: 1. Try on the Silicon Image RAID controller instead of the NVidia RAID controller. or 2. Plug in a basic PCI video card, unplug everything but ONE old IDE drive, and the DVD-ROM drive, and see if I can get it to install x64 with a basic hardware setup. A couple things that concern me: 1. I notice no matter what I try in the NVidia RAID configuration utility, the option to make the array ootable is ALWAYS greyed out, and the description always shows it as N/A ... I've searched and found other people with the problem, but they seem to think they can install anyway... Not sure on that. 2. I tried to update the BIOS from 1009 to ASUS's new 1103 that came out this past weekend. I copied the .ROM file to a diskette, and hit ALT-F2 when the system boots, and it basically says: Searching for diskette... A8N321103.ROM found! ... Reading file... (or something similar, I'm actually at work right now, so I don't have the machine or screen in front of me) But it NEVER goes past that. I eject the diskette, and it says: Searching for CD... No CD found... Searching for diskette... over and over. I was worried for a while, but it looks like it never actually starts flashing the BIOS, so it didn't seem to cause any problems. I'm a little concerned that I can't seem to flash the BIOS on my motherboard though... I'd hate to have to tear everything apart and RMA that sucker. Any other similar cases or suggestions? Any other important information I haven't included that would help? Thanks a million!