NVRAID install failure

That may be true. Different or bad ISO's would explain the disparity in
experiences among people with the same board (I never got pre-RC1 to install).

Congratulations. At $75/hr, each person should get a free copy of Vista
Gold for their time. Heck, at minimum wage I would earn a copy.
--
Brad


"Jon Davis" wrote:

> After some Googling I concluded that
> apparently the initial ISO release of Vista was a corrupted release or
> something.
>
> Anyway, Vista went through all the setup and reboot processes and I am
> actually writing this within Vista on my primary partition of my RAID array.
> Oh, by the way, I did NOT use ANY Vista drivers--neither nVidia's Vista Beta
> 2 drivers nor their Vista RC1 drivers. I only used nVidia's XP x64 drivers
> that I put on the floppy drive to install XP x64 onto my RAID array.
>
> Yay me. Now I go to sleep.
>
> Jon

I suspect your right. Whether checking the downloaded file's MD5/SHA1
encoding and verifying the burn is enough - I don't know.

There may be another difference for users, even with the same motherboard,
who have different controller BIOS and may be caught by the latest drivers
which are not compatible with the older BIOS.

My test PC has a gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI and has nVidia and Silicon Image SATA
RAID controllers built in.

Over a year ago nVidia changed the BIOS on nVidia raid controllers (the BIOS
version changed from 4.?? to 4.84); my board requires me to identify whether
I have the newer or older BIOS. nForce4 drivers from 6.65 apparently do not
work correctly on the older BIOS.

Similarly Silicon Image updated their BIOS for the SiI3114 on my board
(currently at 5.3.14). The latest XP drivers (1.5.5.0) work for Vista x32
and x64, both at Beta2 and RC1. I had problems with WinXP when I first got
the board trying to set up a RAID on the Silicon Image until I updated the
BIOS.

Vista Beta2 worked "as expected" with nVidia beta2 drivers. For me Vista
RC1 (x86 and x64) only works with XP drivers and, even then, I cannot
install Vista without using WinXP to launch the install.

I agree that for those who have struggled to get Vista running and have done
some "serious ?" they should be rewarded with a gold release but at $75/hr
I might prefer the money. With our minimum wage of £5 it would take 40+
hours to get there.


Brian



"Brad" <> wrote in message
newsDF580EC-CC67-489B-AFF6-...
> That may be true. Different or bad ISO's would explain the disparity in
> experiences among people with the same board (I never got pre-RC1 to
> install).
>
> Congratulations. At $75/hr, each person should get a free copy of Vista
> Gold for their time. Heck, at minimum wage I would earn a copy.
> --
> Brad
>
>
> "Jon Davis" wrote:
>
>> After some Googling I concluded that
>> apparently the initial ISO release of Vista was a corrupted release or
>> something.
>>
>> Anyway, Vista went through all the setup and reboot processes and I am
>> actually writing this within Vista on my primary partition of my RAID
>> array.
>> Oh, by the way, I did NOT use ANY Vista drivers--neither nVidia's Vista
>> Beta
>> 2 drivers nor their Vista RC1 drivers. I only used nVidia's XP x64
>> drivers
>> that I put on the floppy drive to install XP x64 onto my RAID array.
>>
>> Yay me. Now I go to sleep.
>>
>> Jon
>

In response to the last paragraph, I am so there at half minimum wage though
I would like to earn it in the UK and spend it here.

As a postlogue to this whole problem, I've enjoyed three weeks of error free
operation with RC1 since this thread began. Today I was sitting there in a
moment of bliss, staring at my default desktop background absolutely
mesmerized when, out of the blue, the BSOD appears. I made note of the
failure in the nvatax64 driver and rebooted but the system is dead, hanging
on crcdisk.sys each time. From the boot CD, I tried repairing using both the
Vista Beta 2 and XP drivers, startup repair and system restore options but
without success. I won't go on about the individual error messages I
received but the disk is corrupt (they are brand new Maxtors). My thought
might be that I have a bad hard drive but has anyone noticed that Nvidia has
pulled the IDE directory out of their RC1 drivers? This is an interesting
tell and I think they must be aware that something is wrong. Thought you
might like to know so as not to make Vista your mission critical system
(right) lest you have a surprise.
--
Brad


"Brian P Fielding" wrote:

> I suspect your right. Whether checking the downloaded file's MD5/SHA1
> encoding and verifying the burn is enough - I don't know.
>
> There may be another difference for users, even with the same motherboard,
> who have different controller BIOS and may be caught by the latest drivers
> which are not compatible with the older BIOS.
>
> My test PC has a gigabyte GA-K8NXP-SLI and has nVidia and Silicon Image SATA
> RAID controllers built in.
>
> Over a year ago nVidia changed the BIOS on nVidia raid controllers (the BIOS
> version changed from 4.?? to 4.84); my board requires me to identify whether
> I have the newer or older BIOS. nForce4 drivers from 6.65 apparently do not
> work correctly on the older BIOS.
>
> Similarly Silicon Image updated their BIOS for the SiI3114 on my board
> (currently at 5.3.14). The latest XP drivers (1.5.5.0) work for Vista x32
> and x64, both at Beta2 and RC1. I had problems with WinXP when I first got
> the board trying to set up a RAID on the Silicon Image until I updated the
> BIOS.
>
> Vista Beta2 worked "as expected" with nVidia beta2 drivers. For me Vista
> RC1 (x86 and x64) only works with XP drivers and, even then, I cannot
> install Vista without using WinXP to launch the install.
>
> I agree that for those who have struggled to get Vista running and have done
> some "serious ?" they should be rewarded with a gold release but at $75/hr
> I might prefer the money. With our minimum wage of £5 it would take 40+
> hours to get there.
>
>
> Brian
>
>
>
> "Brad" <> wrote in message
> newsDF580EC-CC67-489B-AFF6-...
> > That may be true. Different or bad ISO's would explain the disparity in
> > experiences among people with the same board (I never got pre-RC1 to
> > install).
> >
> > Congratulations. At $75/hr, each person should get a free copy of Vista
> > Gold for their time. Heck, at minimum wage I would earn a copy.
> > --
> > Brad
> >
> >
> > "Jon Davis" wrote:
> >
> >> After some Googling I concluded that
> >> apparently the initial ISO release of Vista was a corrupted release or
> >> something.
> >>
> >> Anyway, Vista went through all the setup and reboot processes and I am
> >> actually writing this within Vista on my primary partition of my RAID
> >> array.
> >> Oh, by the way, I did NOT use ANY Vista drivers--neither nVidia's Vista
> >> Beta
> >> 2 drivers nor their Vista RC1 drivers. I only used nVidia's XP x64
> >> drivers
> >> that I put on the floppy drive to install XP x64 onto my RAID array.
> >>
> >> Yay me. Now I go to sleep.
> >>
> >> Jon
> >
>
>
>
>