Vista RC1 nightmares [Archive] - Overclockers Forums

Nebulous

09-24-06, 11:43 AM

I cannot believe this @#$%&^# nightmare!

After several days of d/ling countless copies of this blasted os, burning 5 copies that turned out to be coasters, the 6th copy finally working ( thx to alcohol 120%). I have builds 5600 & 5728 burned successfully, having 2 working keys, i cannot get the dam raid to be seen or recognized.:mad:

I've searched the net for the Vista drivers and finally found something that resembled the vista drivers. D/led and put on floppy disks. Also used the drivers from the mobo's disk along with the ones from asus' site.

Go thru the deal again:

Boot from DVD
Installs files
window for key appers
type in key & hit next
looks for drives
NO DRIVES DETECTED ??

insert raid driver disk
search for drivers on disk
find drivers, install said drivers
Still NO DANG DRIVES DETECTED!
Use a different driver disk
Find driver...yet again
install driver...again

NO @#$%^&* DRIVES DETECTED!

I've been in this blasted loop for hours looking for a solution as to why it won't find my drives. Haven't found any. If it wasn't for the censor filter inbedded here I would make my anger clear in a language illegal in most states :mad: :mad:

WTF?

nikhsub1

09-24-06, 11:47 AM

What drivers are you trying to install? You have to EXTRACT them first.

Blackstar

09-24-06, 11:55 AM

I cannot believe this @#$%&^# nightmare!

insert raid driver disk
search for drivers on disk
find drivers, install said drivers
Still NO DANG DRIVES DETECTED!
Use a different driver disk
Find driver...yet again
install driver...again

NO @#$%^&* DRIVES DETECTED!

I've been in this blasted loop for hours looking for a solution as to why it won't find my drives. Haven't found any. If it wasn't for the censor filter inbedded here I would make my anger clear in a language illegal in most states :mad: :mad:

WTF?

Dude, it's a "feature". :santa:

- Blackstar

Nebulous

09-24-06, 12:06 PM

What drivers are you trying to install? You have to EXTRACT them first.

Nik, I "think" i know how to xtract files. Done it millions of times over the years :D Am i missing something?

Drivers in question are the Silicon image 3114R SATA raid drivers

and blackstar not 1 peep outta you ya hear?!?! :p

Blackstar

09-24-06, 12:31 PM

Nik, I "think" i know how to xtract files. Done it millions of times over the years :D Am i missing something?

More than you could possibly imagine!!! *ZING!. :D

Drivers in question are the Silicon image 3114R SATA raid drivers.

Are you using onboard SATA controllers or a separate RAID card? If so, have you tried a different slot/reseating it/etc. Do you know if the drivers have been updated for the latest Vista builds you are attempting to use? Anything listed on the SATA bridge maker's site on Vista status? I assume you have used the RAID set up on that motherboard in XP and have not run into trouble?

and blackstar not 1 peep outta you ya hear?!?! :p

Who? Me? :p :D

roYal

09-24-06, 01:19 PM

Same happens to me with the RC1 raid drivers. No drives are detected. I've heard that the RC1 drivers are bugged and to use the beta 2 or xp drivers. Give it a try and let us know if it worked out for you. I would try it, but i lost my rc1 cd and i'm too lazy to re-burn it cause i don't really care about vista till it goes retail.

Nebulous

09-24-06, 02:04 PM

Blackstar you're off the hook ! lol

As for the sata raid drivers from the board:

Yep, used them before with zero issues. Always used them with xp. Used also with 2K and not 1 problem

Onboard sata:
Yep. No raid card anymore.

Latest Raid drivers from the sites:
Yep. Both on silicon image's site & Asus's site to no avail.

Looks like I'm not gonna use vista.

*Edit*

Well I tried again numerous times. I even tried disabling the silicon image and enabling the Nvidia raid in the bios and same dang problem:

Run the Vista DVD
Click on "clean install" blah blah
Enter key
Looks for drives : NO DRIVE DETECTED :rolleyes:

Insert floppy disk with the latest NVraid drivers
"Browse" for said drivers...again
Find and install said drivers...again
Scans for drives......again

and then the catch phrase of the day:

NO @#$%^&* DRIVES DETECTED BONEHEAD!

The next window reads: HAVEN'T YOU LEARNED YOUR LESSON? I JUST SAID NUMEROUS TIMES NO DAM DRIVES DETECTED! NOW GO AWAY!

:mad:

I give up :rolleyes:

Blackstar

09-24-06, 03:37 PM

Nebulous

09-24-06, 04:10 PM

Do you have a RAID card that might work? If they have Vista drivers of course.

Will the install work properly on a single drive first? (to verify it working correctly) Then simply clone the OS to the RAID array and try booting to it?

- Blackstar

Nope, no raid card. No sata raid card either. Yeah it'll run in single drive, but it won't run the raid :rolleyes:

Bah, I'm done

Dermen

09-24-06, 07:11 PM

It wouldn't recognize my raid either. I had to boot into XP, then put the Vista disk in my drive while in XP. I then chose clean install and it saw my raid, but I still had to tell it to install raid drivers on that step. After that it installed fine. Unfortunatly I wanted to try x64 so I had to install XP x64 first, and then install Vista x64. I don't know why the raid drivers don't work if you boot off the DVD.

Nebulous

09-24-06, 07:31 PM

Yeah, I saw that thread about doing the install that way. Well I tried it and would'nt you know it, it saw the raid but no matter what i did it would'nt not accept the silicon image raid drivers :rolleyes: I'm batting a thousand..

*edit*

Well according to the thread Here (http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=463502&highlight=Vista+on+nVidia+RAID+0), it gives great instructions on how to install Vista on raid, but the magic word here is NVIDIA nForce(tm) RAID . but not Silicon Image RAID.

In order for me to install vista on my raid, I would have to:

1) Format the hdd's
2)Recreate the raid, but instead use the NVRAID and not the silicon image raid i'm used to
3) Reinstall winxp
4) Update xp :rolleyes:

Then after all this, then and only then I go about installing Vista ontop of the freshly installed XP i just got done with. All that just to try an os that's not official and it's a trial version? Screw that! :rolleyes:

I'll wait until Vista, or whatever it will be called by then, to do the fresh install and not go thru all the hassle.

Sheeeeeeeeeesh !

Blackstar

09-24-06, 09:23 PM

Then after all this, then and only then I go about installing Vista ontop of the freshly installed XP i just got done with. All that just to try an os that's not official and it's a trial version? Screw that! :rolleyes:

I'll wait until Vista, or whatever it will be called by then, to do the fresh install and not go thru all the hassle.

Sheeeeeeeeeesh !

Cause it's a feature! I'm tell'in ya! :bday:

You could just get a Mac and have it all just work? http://blackstarproductions.net/bsp_files/bsp_movies/serenity/adhd.gif

- Blackstar

Nebulous

09-24-06, 09:58 PM

Cause it's a feature! I'm tell'in ya! :bday:

You could just get a Mac and have it all just work? http://blackstarproductions.net/bsp_files/bsp_movies/serenity/adhd.gif

- Blackstar

Laugh it up fuzzball! :p

Audioaficionado

09-24-06, 11:27 PM

Blackstar

09-24-06, 11:37 PM

Laugh it up fuzzball! :p

Oh you KNOW it! :santa:

I'm going to be loving all the "Vista Nightmare" threads soon to be unleashed... assuming it ever ships. :D heheheheehehe.

Plus with the quad core Intel chips coming (people have already tested them in the new Mac Pro towers) The idea of having a 8 core machine with the exact same hardware and being less expensive than the PC counterpart running any OS I want... is just too sweet.

The upgrade headaches Vista will bring I'm sure will be around for years to come. Hell, XP is 5 years old and see how much is still not right with it. ;) I remember for years everyone screaming they would not touch XP with a ten foot poll. Now look, everyone is running it. Now people are saying the same with Vista, they won't touch it. Well, in 5 years, no one will be NOT running it. So don't feel bad about the RAID situation right now. The performance increase booting from RAID... well, I don't think would be worth the headache right now. You'd prolly do better with just a single fast SATA II parallel drive right now.

But hey, if your up for it, try Audio's solution, it just might give you hope for the future!

- Blackstar

K15

09-25-06, 12:14 AM

Here's the solution to ALL your problems. Don't raid:beer:

Xtreme Barton

09-25-06, 01:20 AM

i say try audio's advice.. if he got it to work chances are you will too. just be patient.

what did you expect out of rc build ?? perfect software to every problem ? :D

vista is a pain to get going but once you do its pretty cool if you have a decent machine..

Nebulous

09-25-06, 08:48 AM

Google DriverGrabber.exe.

If you have your RAID installed in XP just let DriverGrabber.exe do its magic and extract the essential driver files such as the .cat, .dll, .inf, etc.
No .exe files will do as Vista won't see them as driver files.

Here's what is in my Silicon Image extracted driver folder looks like.

(Silicon Image SiI 3112 SATARaid Controller)
oem14.inf
SI3112r.cat
SI3112r.sys
SilSupp.cpl
SiWinAcc.sys

Anyway when I pointed Vista at that folder, it saw the oem.inf and gobbled them up like candy and my array was suddenly visible and accessable within seconds.

That's the extracted driver files I think nikhsub1 was talking about.

Well I took your suggestion. D/led DriverGrabber.exe and let it do it's thing. Found all drivers then I saved the raid drivers on a floppy. Went thru the installion process again with vista. Pointed vista to the floppy to get the raid drivers and viola it worked. Finally got it done and completed.

Thanx Audio ;)

Nebulous

09-25-06, 06:29 PM

*Update*

Well after test driving vista, decided to go back to xp, but i got a dual boot thing going on. I partioned my raid drives so i can have 30gb just for Vista.

Runs nice too :)

jeffp83

09-26-06, 02:55 AM

You do realize that Windows Vista is still beta right? Not to be a turd, but don't expect everything to work 100% from this new OS.

Audioaficionado

09-26-06, 07:28 AM

You do realize that Windows Vista is still beta right? Not to be a turd, but don't expect everything to work 100% from this new OS.Of course we do, however at this point is has to be able to install on the vast majority of capable hardware. With over 2.5 GB of data on that install DVD you would think Microsoft could have put a few more things on it such as the drivers for all the commonly found sata/pata/scsi controller chips with the 2 GB of room left on the disk. :rolleyes: That floppy driver loading scenario was supposed to be eliminated post XP.

jcw122

09-26-06, 09:06 AM

1. This is Windows.

2. It's RC1, as in Release Candidate, just consider it beta.

I hate people expecting so much from beta software...it's stupid.

Audioaficionado

09-26-06, 10:14 AM

1. This is Windows.

2. It's RC1, as in Release Candidate, just consider it beta.

I hate people expecting so much from beta software...it's stupid.RCI means it should be almost ready for RTM. If people don't find all the bugs and post them and report them to Microsoft, how will Vista be improved?

I say find and post every single bug you can find so the rest of us can be forewared and perhaps come up with solutions like I was able to do for Nebulous

Tebore

09-26-06, 10:25 AM

I read all these RC1 nightmare threads and it makes me wonder why don't people use Virtual PC 2004 to test out Vista. If it's no good they can just delete the image. It also allows you to test out the drivers for vista because you wipe your main system to test it out.

Dermen

09-26-06, 01:30 PM

So I went to install the newer build of Vista. What a PITA. It wouldn't let me install over the top of the old version, it kept saying not enough space(I have it on a 30gig partition). So I tried booting off the newer CD thinking it might see my RAID for some reason. It didn't. I ended up installing XP x64 over Vista, then installing the new Vista build over XP x64.

Audioaficionado

09-26-06, 02:25 PM

Nebulous

09-26-06, 03:02 PM

1. This is Windows.

2. It's RC1, as in Release Candidate, just consider it beta.

I hate people expecting so much from beta software...it's stupid.

Ok, before anyone assumes anything, all I was posting was i having a major problem with installing it :rolleyes:

1) I already knew it was beta
2) i wasn't expecting anything
3) All i wanted was to try it

Period!

With Audio's help i was able to install it and try it. yes it has it's bugs, and yes it does act up from time to time. It's made my pc crash and bsod several times already. Now again all i wanted was to try it out and i have. For a beta os that i got for free it's nice. Now if i was to pay it's retail cost and these problems came up, you'd bet i would be peed-off big time.

I was angry for the fact that ppl with more or less the same specs as me wasn't having issues installing and running Vista. Unfortunately I was in the group that did have issues and failures installing it, this is what got me teed.

With my griping someone, (Audio :D ), was kind enough to post the information i needed to resolve my problem and it worked.

Dermen

09-26-06, 03:19 PM

Vista won't do an upgrade unless you start the install from within XP or Vista. If you boot from the DVD that option isn't available.

Also when you install it over an existing windows OS without reformatting, it will gather up the windows, program files and user folders and place them in 'windows old' folder.

So if you had a 30 GB partition with say > 20GB of data on it, Vista wouldn't have enough room as it takes 9GB all by itself and once it packed up the old stuff and dropped its files down there wouldn't be enough room left for the page file or for defragging.

I don't know if that was your issue but I thought I'd mention it in case someone else could use the info.

Yeah it was telling me there wasn't enough room. All I had installed was drivers, anti-virus, ventrilo, msn, xfire, and firefox. Other than that it was just like a clean install of Vista. I had to pictures/video/documents of any kind saved in Vista. A 30GB partition just isn't big enough I guess.

Audioaficionado

09-26-06, 05:35 PM

One more thing about windows. It needs a primary active partition to install its boot files. If that 30GB partition happened to be an extended/logical partition and there was no available primary partition to install its boot files to, you will also get that message.

Vista also refuses to install on FAT or FAT32. It's NTFS only so that primary needs to be NTFS.

XP OTOH will happily install on FAT32 or NTFS.

JustChill

10-01-06, 09:10 PM

I used NLIGHT to streemline the dvd with the newest nvidia raid drivers and it worked for me both from dvd and from win xp-x64. Dunno Just lettin you know about my Exp. If anyone needs to know how to do it just pm me.
JC

MRD

10-01-06, 09:36 PM

Vista also refuses to install on FAT or FAT32. It's NTFS only so that primary needs to be NTFS.

That's kind of annoying. Granted, NTFS is superior for most situations, but it would be nice to maintain the ability to choose.

I use FAT32 over NTFS (Win 2K doesn't care) as it's more compatible.

One more reason not to upgrade to Vista.

deathman20

10-01-06, 10:06 PM

Insert floppy disk with the latest NVraid drivers
"Browse" for said drivers...again
Find and install said drivers...again
Scans for drives......again

Ok maybe a little off topic but does it really still use a damn floppy drive to install drivers with? Can't you use a Flash Drive or soemthing else to update drivers?

Nebulous

10-02-06, 02:31 PM

Ok maybe a little off topic but does it really still use a damn floppy drive to install drivers with? Can't you use a Flash Drive or soemthing else to update drivers?

Well it does ( me thinks) but i don't have a thumb drive or a flash drive to use. I gotta do it the old fashioned way.

Anyways an update:

Aftre several days of test running vista RC1, it was only a matter of time before vista started to get all screwy on me. Started random crashes and plenty of bsod's :rolleyes: . Format the partition and reinstall only for it to get worse :mad: . Dunno what happened and i figured a format and reinstall would clear it. After several tries of this I just got to a point and formatted my entire raid array and reinstall xp from scratch, thus eliminating vista all together. And befor anyone asks : yes i reinstalled vista sevral times running stock speed to no avail. I'm going to just stay with xp until it becomes obsolete, then I'll go with linux.

K15

10-02-06, 05:07 PM

That's kind of annoying. Granted, NTFS is superior for most situations, but it would be nice to maintain the ability to choose.

I use FAT32 over NTFS (Win 2K doesn't care) as it's more compatible.

One more reason not to upgrade to Vista.

I'm glad they finally killed FAT32, killing the FAT legacy altogether, a 25 year old file system, completely obsolete. Forcing Vista to be compatible with FAT32 would weigh it down more. Microsoft needs to ditch more obsolete code than they do, not less.
But I wish there were cluster size options for NTFS. 4kb is much too small IMO. Performance would improve with 32 or even 64kb clusters. I don't care about slack, at least give me the option.

Enablingwolf

10-02-06, 05:21 PM

I am a little late to the party.

One word of advice.. Whenever you prepare to create/burn an ISO of a disc. Make sure the MD5 sums match. It will save a load of headaches later on. There will not be the 12 hours of finding out you wasted all that time. A few minutes to make the check is well worth it./

It does not care if it is a ISO of Linux or MS. even a dvd of a movie. I include MD5's of files that are critical to data integrity. Take the time to add it or otherwise check the MD5. It saves time and energy. Heck that is one of the bomb things of torrents. It has that built in. Winrar even shows the MD5 of files.

MRD

10-02-06, 07:13 PM

I'm glad they finally killed FAT32, killing the FAT legacy altogether, a 25 year old file system, completely obsolete. Forcing Vista to be compatible with FAT32 would weigh it down more. Microsoft needs to ditch more obsolete code than they do, not less.
But I wish there were cluster size options for NTFS. 4kb is much too small IMO. Performance would improve with 32 or even 64kb clusters. I don't care about slack, at least give me the option.

FAT32, however, is an open specification and is well understood. This makes it compatible with a lot of things that ntfs is not compatible with. There's no reason ntfs couldn't be like that, except that MS deliberately obscures the standard to sabotage competitors.

I agree though that outside of its compatibility, FAT32 is not a particularly great file system. That being said, if I can't write to it from all the os's I run, as I can with FAT32, ntfs is useless to me.

Xtreme Barton

10-02-06, 07:42 PM

.......except that MS deliberately obscures the standard to sabotage competitors........

that sir has truth to it .. unfortunetly :mad:

take a look in the news about microsoft and antivirus companies .. no bueno !!

microsoft has done this since birth really though.. i guess there excuse is its ther creation (meaning OS) so why not be able to integrate all the cool features people like..

i dunno .. but its happened for a long time and WILL continue till the end of MS .... or bill gates :eek: :beer:

K15

10-02-06, 07:57 PM

FAT32, however, is an open specification and is well understood. This makes it compatible with a lot of things that ntfs is not compatible with. There's no reason ntfs couldn't be like that, except that MS deliberately obscures the standard to sabotage competitors.

I agree though that outside of its compatibility, FAT32 is not a particularly great file system. That being said, if I can't write to it from all the os's I run, as I can with FAT32, ntfs is useless to me.

Fair enough. Though I use Linux off and on, that's about the extent of it. I'm on Windows 90% of the time and Linux sometimes.

MRD

10-02-06, 08:22 PM

The added benefits of ntfs aren't worth the loss of compatibility to me.

stompah

10-04-06, 02:32 PM

Dino, any reason why your install became buggy? I as thinking of installing it on my HTPC and now you have me unsure if its worth the time. I have played with Longhorn, is Vista any fun? Is it worth me wiping a rig for a few weeks just for a toy OS?

And Brian.... take your Apple talk and eat it ;) Living in M$land has made me bitter.

Its good to see you guys BTW.

Audioaficionado

10-05-06, 12:05 AM

Just a thought...

I've had very few DRM issues on my 32bit Xeon rig, however I would like you guys with the 64bit rigs and 32bit or 64bit Vista to test out ripping mp3 streams, ripping CD music, DVD shrink, etc, and tell us if Vista interferes and won't let you do any of these things.

My hardware doesn't have that built in DRM lock all the newer 64bit processors have so I most likely won't have the same issues with DRM you might encounter.