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Mar 14, 2006, 02:14 AM
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Obvious Closet Brony Pony
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Nvidia's Nforce 4 (all) Raid/Sata Controller
I got 2 blank Sata 2 160gb Drives (identical)
I enabled the sata ports and enabled RAID for both of them. BUT Apon hitting F10... setting it to striping and 128kb block size, and then selecting the 2 drives to raid together.... i'm greeted with a HD Led stuck on, system doesn't respond to escape or crtl+alt+del... the cursor up in the left hand corner is still blinking.. So i figure nvraid is doing it work... let it be but it's been like 1 hour.... i've never ever ever had to wait for anything to raid 2 drives.. just select and boom done... load xp cd... load sata raid drivers... partition away and go go gadget fast load! should i wait longer.. is this normal?
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Last edited by Judas; Mar 14, 2006 at 06:50 PM. Reason: The truth |
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Mar 14, 2006, 02:54 AM
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Thread Starter
#2
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Obvious Closet Brony Pony
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getting damn close to 2 hours now
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Mar 14, 2006, 03:48 AM
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Thread Starter
#3
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Obvious Closet Brony Pony
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now i'm really thinking nvidia hasn't a freaking clue about making a decent raid controller....
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Mar 14, 2006, 05:10 AM
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Thread Starter
#4
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Obvious Closet Brony Pony
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it's official... nvidia has one hell of a POS raid controller...
not only that.. if you do get the damn thing to finally work somewhat... the damn nvidia raid controller drives refuse to work cause nvidia has absalutely zero knowledge on making something actually work the way they are saposed to.. Nvidia falls even further on my acceptance list..... i don't know if i could stand to buy another nforce board...
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Mar 14, 2006, 06:27 AM
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#5 |
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I like computers.
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I hate RAID problems as well...
 Is that the only RAID controller you have on the motherboard? Some come with two or so, so there may be a better controller you can use. 
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 Always knew I didn't belong in this world. I wasn't made for this. But I'll never forget those who betrayed me, and those who never failed my trust. |
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Mar 14, 2006, 06:48 AM
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#6 |
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Member
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Posts: 5,989
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not sure this is the case. i've seen some information about the Nforce4 chipset motherboards have some incompatibility problem with some of 3Gb/s SATA drives of the Seagate Barracuda 7200.9's (the initial revision/firmwere: 2AAA) and some of Maxtor DiamondMax's.
anyway, i don't use any of the Nforce chipset motherboards atm, but after i knew about the problem i emailed the Seagate supports, told them that i plan to use the Seagate 7200.9's hard drives on the Nforce chipset motherboards, and don't want to have any problem when using the drives. then after a few email conversations, finally, they asked me for the models, serial numbers and the existing revisions on all the drives that i have, then they sent me 2 updated firmware files. the firmweres on Seagates model IDs: ST3808110AS and ST3160812AS will be updated from versions 2AAA or 3.AAD to 3.AAE. i also saw on the internet, in one of the non-english web sites that the Seagate 7200.9 250GB (ST3250824AS) and 500GB (ST3500641AS) have a firmware update too. i think, the firmware on these Seagate 7200.9's drives needs to be updated in order to use with Nforce4 chipset motherboards. and for people who uses the 3Gb/s SATA Seagate 7200.9's hard drives, or plan to buy them. as for your information, AFAICT, there is no problem with these drives when using them on Intel 925, 945, 955 chipset series motherboards, on both non-RAID and Intel ICH6R/7R Matrix RAIDs. Firmware updates improves a few things, the drives SMART informations and on some of the drives there are some of the transfer rates improvement, but the firmware updates are not neccesary. you decide. Last edited by PangingJr; Mar 14, 2006 at 07:42 AM. |
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Mar 14, 2006, 03:58 PM
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Thread Starter
#7
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Obvious Closet Brony Pony
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well i was fooling around and kept reseting and going into the raid utility. And suddenly it worked.. got them to setup instantly.. (not take hours)..
Heres the thing.. they work flawlessly if i disable raid controller.. both are seen perfectly fine.... hell even patition magic boots up and see it as a full 300gb... partitionable... but i don't like using partition magic... In any case... soon as i got that working... i went ahead to boot from cd... got to the floppy loading portion with F6 and i'm greeted with more crap. The damn floppies don't work..... tried everything and finally got the CD supplied makedisk to spit out something that xp 64 could load... and now i'm sitting here with a Machine_Check_exception BSOD apon completing the loading of the drivers and getting to where windows first loads up so you can continue to go through the initial setup.. (making partitions and picking which partition to install windows to..).. Now i'm convinced that nvidia is a bloated hunk of crap company.... And i'm finding very little information related to the machine check exception error... Aside from a pile of people having the same damn problem...
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Mar 14, 2006, 06:50 PM
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Thread Starter
#8
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Obvious Closet Brony Pony
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tested hardrives:
2 Sata 2 Maxtors (even tried them with Sata1 jumper mode) 2 sata 1 Seagates (these appear to work... but had to completely reset the cmos) 2 Sata 1 Maxtors (these appear to work... but had to completely reset the cmos) various sizes All same results on the no go raid controller crap on 4 Asus Boards (A8N-E rev 2.0), all of which i've tried a fair many different bios and sata chipset driver loading configurations.. all same results... either a Machine_Check_Exception BSOD or freezing apon attempting to "startup windows" or freezing when trying to either create or delete an array. Additionally, apparently running SATA2 drives (only got the 2 maxtors right now)... will not work, freezing at the windows startup (no BSODs though)..... or hanging @ the windows loading (if you've gotten as far as creating partitions and formating and copying files, next part being loading from there which it hangs).. IMO, Nvidia has one hell of a nasty mess on there hands.. I've a single 250gb Sata1 Maxtor here that i can plug in and load from with 0 issues.. but as far as i can tell: Nvidia's Raid controller is USELESS Nvidia's Sata2 Support is, lack for a better word: Bullshit And doing searches on the net results in nearly everyone having nothing but piles of troubles if not complete failures. Only a select few seem to work, and everyone else hasn't even bothered to try. I'm experiencing this even on the NF4 x32 SLI board i've got..... only the silicon image controller works... but nvidia's doesn't work at all....period!
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Last edited by Judas; Mar 14, 2006 at 10:33 PM. |
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Mar 14, 2006, 06:53 PM
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Thread Starter
#9
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Obvious Closet Brony Pony
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er... additionally..... with a Sata2 drive as a single (no raiding)... trying to load windows after the format and copying of files.... it doesn't really hang.. it looks like it loops..
windows Xp 64bit sp1 has been showing the little blue bar going around for roughly 1 hour now.... occasionally freezing for a few seconds then continueing... meanwhile the HD Led is solid the entire time also.... check this thread out.... just a list of all various Motherboards that have the nvidia chipsets.... http://forums.nvidia.com/lofiversion...hp?t10755.html aditional links: http://nvidia.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/n...i=&p_topview=1
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Last edited by Judas; Mar 14, 2006 at 07:34 PM. |
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Mar 14, 2006, 08:02 PM
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#10 | |
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Member
Join Date: Mar 2003
Posts: 5,989
Rep Power: 71 |
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Mar 14, 2006, 08:48 PM
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Thread Starter
#11
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Obvious Closet Brony Pony
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wow... you got the exact same Seagate drive i've got....
an 80gb Sata2 ST3808110AS I'm REALLY in need of something to fix this... although some people have said a firmware update has solved some problems... it doesn't appear to fix them all... and some people have said that the firmware update had done absalutely nothing for them. Nvidia has one hell of a flawed Sata Controller.. so much for Future proofing by making sure it was Sata2 capatible.. rotfl... my poor ATI Xpress board works flawlessly, and i was concerned about a USB issue which doesn't appear to be a problem at all... Someone should really write up a message on the inquirer about this problem rather then how ATI might have a major problem with USB devices... (i hate people).... BTW With your seagate drive.. if it's indeed like mine... heres more info ... i would like the firmware update if possible... Barracuda 7200.9 80Gbyte SATA2 S/N: 3LR07JJY Model: ST3808110AS P/N: 9BD131-301 Firmware: 2AAA Date Code: 06171 Site Code: AMK Soon as i get a responce from Maxtor about all my 160gb Sata2 Drives...... i'll post more about it...
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Mar 14, 2006, 08:59 PM
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#12 |
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Member
Join Date: Mar 2003
Posts: 5,989
Rep Power: 71 |
about the drive firmware updates, if you want to try it i like you to do it right, send an email to Seagate supports and tell them about the problem you are having...
i think they would need to keep a record of your drive(s), this may have something to do with the drive's warranty. |
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Mar 14, 2006, 09:06 PM
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#13 |
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Member
Join Date: Mar 2003
Posts: 5,989
Rep Power: 71 |
don't try to update your drive firmware using files that you might find on the internet.
Seagate will send you something like these... ST3808110AS_xLR_3.AAE.zip ST3160812AS_xLS_3.AAE.zip in the zip files you'll have an instruction on how to update your drives and all of the needed files are included... |
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Mar 14, 2006, 10:30 PM
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Thread Starter
#14
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Obvious Closet Brony Pony
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kk waiting on email yet
still waiting on email from maxtor about there drives as well
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Mar 14, 2006, 10:45 PM
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#15 |
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Member
Join Date: Mar 2003
Posts: 5,989
Rep Power: 71 |
make sure that your email service does not detect and remove the .exe and .bat files, otherwish some of the files will be missing from the zip file.
if that happens to you, ask them to host the files on a server for you to download instead of sending to you in email. also, go to www.bootdisk.com/ and download "Driver Free Disk For BIOS Flashing" if you don't have it yet. use this bootdisk so you'll have plenty of free space on the disk to put the firmware files, a seaflash utility and a batch script file on the same disk. boot the computer with the bootdisk, and then at the DOS prompt, run the T2ES80.BAT. Last edited by PangingJr; Mar 14, 2006 at 11:11 PM. |
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Mar 14, 2006, 11:45 PM
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Thread Starter
#16
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Obvious Closet Brony Pony
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ok
 .... still waiting on them to send....thanks for the link 
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Mar 15, 2006, 04:08 PM
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Thread Starter
#17
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Obvious Closet Brony Pony
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Got the firmware update for the Maxtor drives.
Loaded them successfully. NVraid utility doesn't appear to freeze/hang now. BUT, the drives still do not work as a single drive, as single drives, as raid arrays of any combination. Trying to load windows setup again, i get as far as "setup is starting windows" after loading the F6 drivers... I think Nvidia's Floppy controller is at just as much fault right now, as for some reason, one second it's able to access the files without an issue, the next it's giving me a error or please insert disk.... This happens with both XP 32 and XP 64. But under non-raid mode, the drives still hang.... so theres still a problem
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Mar 19, 2006, 08:47 AM
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#18 |
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Member
Join Date: Mar 2003
Posts: 5,989
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there were also other kind of problem, it's the worst problem, the data corruption problems with some others SATA drives under some of the nforce 4 motherboards, i didn't get into the specific details of the exact motherboards or hard drives, but as i've seen before there were many hard drives had this problem. how they are going to use the computers without worrying too much about data corruption.
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Mar 19, 2006, 11:01 PM
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Thread Starter
#19
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Obvious Closet Brony Pony
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yeah.... i'm still trying to get windows to install on any one of these drives... it's like pulling teeth... and it's not working so great at all...
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Mar 29, 2006, 09:18 AM
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#20 |
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DriverHeaven Newbie
Join Date: Apr 2004
Posts: 1
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I'm having the exact same problem(s) with DFI Lanparty UT NF4-SLI Expert board and two 500GB maxtor drives...
Any word on a resolution? This is driving me insane! I could try to set up the RAID on the si 3114 controller, but that one is limited to 1.5gb/sec transfer rates while these drives support 3gb/sec. The nvidia is supposed to allow 3gb/sec. The numbers suggest a performance hit, but was wondering if it is a valid concern?
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-Treytor Last edited by Treytor; Mar 29, 2006 at 09:28 AM. |
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Mar 29, 2006, 04:52 PM
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Thread Starter
#21
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Obvious Closet Brony Pony
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i beleive that only sata2 ports support the NCQ which is saposed to provide some serious benifits...
But i've yet to get any combination of firmwares or drivers to work with any of the Maxtor/WD/Segate/Samsung SATA2 drives to work with ASUS's range of Nvidia chipset motherboards, DFI's range of nvidia chipset motherboards. I've gone through all of the various hardrive supports, they given me nearly 5 firmwares for each model of drive, and none of them work.
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