The future for nForce4 SLI based PCs and Vista

[Brian P Fielding]

I have a PC with a Gigabyte nForce 4 SLI motherboard - GA-K8NXP-SLI

I am using NVIDIA RAID 0 (Striped) and also the Silicon Image 3114 on board
Raid. I use the NVIDIA RAID for the OS, applications etc. and the Silicon
Image for work files and backup etc.

I have successfully installed and used the beta2 versions of Vista.


I have since attempted fresh installs of Vista RC1 x86 and Vista RC1 x64 on
this PC.

I am unable to install RC1 by booting from the DVD. In each case I have had
to resort to installing via Windows XP (or Win XP x64) and using the
corresponding XP drivers for nForce.

I was previously able to install both beta2 (5536) versions by booting from
the appropriate DVD. This I did a couple of times before receiving RC1.
After attempting to install RC1 I can not longer install either of the beta2
versions by booting from the DVD. This I cannot understand unless during
attempts to install RC1 the drives have been corrupted in some way.

Note: I successfully installed (by booting from the CD) WinXp x64, using F6
to load the drivers, in order to install Vista x64.


The nForce installation note for RC1 and the beta2 drivers:

Some nForce-4 Systems allow a mixture of Parallel ATA (PATA) and Serial ATA
(SATA) drives in a RAID configuration. Such nForce-4 systems are not
supported in this Vista RC-1 driver set. To determine if your nForce-4
system allows such a mixture of PATA and SATA drives in a RAID array, enter
the BIOS setup utility to check.

Although my board is capable of using PATA and SATA drives the PATA side (of
the RAID) has been disabled. PATA is only used for the DVD drives.


From the various MS Vista newsgroups and from the NVIDIA's boards my current
view is that RC1 is not suitable for a nForce4 board and, additionally, RC1
does not support SLI.

(please see:
http://www.nforcershq.com/forum/vis...l?start=0&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=
)

Please those of you with good knowledge of NVIDIA and Vista:
What is the current situation and what can we expect in future
releases and when ?


Thanks
Brian

 

[Guest]

Brian, I am not sure about SLI, but I have an EPOX Nforce 4 board. I am using
the onboard IDE RAID controller with my 2 IDE drives. When I first installed
RC1(I put the os on a seperate SATA drive) Vista did not recognize the RAID
array. Turns out in device manager, I noticed that RC1 just installed
"Standard parallel ATA controller drivers for the Nforce disk controllers.
You are right, those beta Nforce 4 drivers for vista do not support PATA raid
on Nforce chipsets, but I still got it to work in the end. I manualy updated
the ATA controller drivers to the XP Nforce drivers version 6.86. I rebooted
and now device manager reported them as Nforce 4 ATA controllers, just like
in XP. And now it recognizes my raid array, and everything is fine. As far as
games goes, 2 out of the 3 I have tried keep crashing. But anyway at least in
my initial testing of RC1 on my particular system, Nforce 4 and Vista for me,
are getting along fine.

Shane

 

[Brian P Fielding]

Shane, thanks for replying.

I'm am trying to use a SATA RAID; at the start of the installation, after I
have loaded the NVIDIA drivers (does not matter whether I use CD, USB, hard
disc or floppy disc) the hard drives / partitions on the NVIDIA controller
are not shown. The drives (and partitions) on the Silicon Image controller
are - and, yes, I could install Vista on them. I suspect, like yourself, I
could also load the OS onto a non RAID drive on the NVIDIA controller - I
have not tried adding a hard drive to NVIDIA yet.

But I cannot find a way to install Vista on a NVIDIA RAID - without first
loading Vista on a non RAID drive. NVIDIA's latest RC1 drivers don't work
for nForce4 - they appear to be for the newer boards with nVidia 570/590
controllers.

The frustrating thing is that I could do a fresh installs (either x64 or
x86) on the NVIDIA RAID with the Beta2 releases but I cannot even do that
now - something has been changed. I have reformatted the partitions to no
effect.

To be fair, once Vista is loaded it generally works fine: I can use Vista
based PCs as part of a domain - running Office 2007 and accessing SBS server
for mail, files, profiles etc; the newsreader works fine as does access to
Company Web. Access to printers on the domain are now OK.

But, I have problems with sound on x64; cannot use SCSI devices on either,
and can only use half the SLI video card. Symantec antivirus (part of
Business pack) works fine on x64 but is problematic on x86. Next to try are
games.

Thanks
Brian