A8N32 Step-by-step installation?

I ordered my new blocks from CrazePC last night. I decided to go ahead and buy them even though I don't have all of the important parts yet.

MCW55 for the GPU
Apogee for the CPU

Now, if I can get Etrade to let go of my cash balance, I'll buy the rest of my parts.

Just ordered my processor from NewEgg: Opty 175 OEM package. It's likely to be a new stepping, so I"m holding my breath.

Still more to buy, but E-Trade won't let go of the cash I have in my accound for another two days. It's so rediculous. It's cash. What are they waiting on?!

I found a nice long thread on OC'ing with this mobo on the Asus forum:
**** edit ****
That link was bad, and now I've deleted it.


Man, Asus's user forum browser is truly craptacular. I can't make a proper link to it at all. Obviously, their expertise is NOT in website development.

The only way to find the thread I refer to is to go to their formus and search for the following exactly as shown below into the green Search box on the left:

Want to begin OCing CP help/suggestions

Then after a rediculously long wait several links to the exact same thread will appear. Pick any one of them and then go to Page 1 of the thread and start reading from there.

Here's a link to the forums to get you started though:

Asus Forum

Ok, from a different thread I started (this one), I learned that it is best to use nlite to integrate the NVRaid Drivers as well as slipstream XP SP2 onto one installation CD.

Here's a website how-to that I located:

Integration of NVRaid Drivers


Still reading it....

And this will allow windows install on a RAID0 array? I've always been under the asumption the array had to be configured prior to the launching of the install program. I think what a lot of people are missing is these drivers F:\Drivers\Chipset\MakeDisk\XP_2K" of which one these two files are required for booting RAID, but not sure if required otherwise. When you hit F6 and Windows asks for the required files they are both labeled ......(required). The only place I found this set was browsing the set up CD.
Now if SP2 can be integrated along with the drivers on one disk, I'm all ears. Did you use this method?
And re: your other thread, my first RMA from ASUS arrived neatly packaged, but had been racked hard enough in shipment to dislodge, misshape and break the spring pins holding the heat pipe in place, or should I say, partially in place. I took my claim straight to ASUS rather than the vendor (although they replied promptly with the appropriate response), I went direct to ASUS figuring their supply line was much shorter.

PS. Which proved true.

EDIT: The referred to files are in addition to the three options on the install disk menu.

*sigh*

This whole slipstreaming/bootable drive/drive image stuff has me pretty discouraged. 4 hours later and 6 coasters and I'm giving up.

I have yet to find one single place on the net that gives me a REAL step by step process for doing the SP2 + integrating the nvraid drivers onto a slipstreamed BOOTABLE cd.

I think I'm just going to try to load up windoze the old fassion way and hope that the F6 process will actually work.

Check those drivers I referenced. I couldn't get mine to take without those drivers included in the F6 insertion.

mrgreenjeans said:

EDIT: The referred to files are in addition to the three options on the install disk menu.

Click to expand...

You mean there are more drivers to F6 in aside from the two nvidia ones?

http://www.short-media.com/review.php?r=284&p=1

It doesn't get any more laid out then that Although nlite has a new version out now so you'll have to figure a few steps out. And make sure you have the .net v2.0 from microsoft installed on the computer you are running nLite with. Also tell it to make a bootable ISO, then burn the ISO at the end and you are done.

Biznatch,

Well, that guide make sense up until the buring part. Nero 7 demo doesn't allow the XPBoot.bin file, it only wants IMA files.

And, nlite doesn't create a bootable iso. It creats a winwar.iso file, not an image file. Every time I have tried to burn this winwar.iso file as an "image" I end up with a CD rom with a copy of winwar.iso that, of course, doesn't boot.

The problem is that this process depends on two or more programs, both of which maintained by totally independent software vendors/developers. An update to one breaks the other. At least, that's what I've encountered.

(edit.... see below. YES nlite does create a bootable iso. The trick seems to be to find CD burning software that writes it to the disk properly and with no weird steps to confuse a CD buring noob like me)

winwar.iso is just the name it saves the ISO as. Change the name to WXPVOL_EN.iso to make life easier. When you are finished making the ISO with nlite, Don't follow the instructions that webpage gives you to burn the ISO. They are showing how to burn the files from the folder. Read on how to burn an ISO in nero's help. It will read the ISO and get all the files and make a bootable CD from them. If you tell it to burn a data cd without specifiying that you are burning an ISO...well you saw what happens

OK, well, Nero 7 demo has some sorta bug in it. It asks for you to save the image file even though you are trying to burn it. There are several forum entries about bugs in Nero 7, and I couldn't find a demo of Nero 6.6.

Anyway...

I was able to burn the image file, though, by using my old NTI CD Maker 6 Platinum software. Man, I thought that software was too old to use. But, it worked. I think I'm ready to install this weekend!

Argh, I need to do slipstream SP2 as well, I can't install the X2 hotfixes without SP2, and also a few other programs need SP2. But I recently uninstalled my Nero, so lost the registration key.

Is there a place for me to download nLite so I can follow that guide to have it work?

darksparkz said:

Is there a place for me to download nLite so I can follow that guide to have it work?

Click to expand...

nlite

Yes. Explore the Drivers/Chipset/ file on your install CD. In fact I couldn't get the RAID0 to boot until I inserted those files in the F6 process. And pick only the ones required for insertion depending on the config of your system.
I too explored the nLite option and left it around the 4th coaster.

Don't use the ata/ide drivers or the firewall network manager from nvidia. Both will crash your system.

DeepScience said:

Don't use the ata/ide drivers or the firewall network manager from nvidia. Both will crash your system.

Click to expand...

Oh jeez....
According to the website that details which Nvidia drivers to install (linked previously in this thread) indicate that you have to pull some older ide drivers from 6.7 Legacy in order for the raid drivers to work. Is that still the case?

Mine work fine. In fact windows wouldn't see my cdrom untill I installed the IDE drivers. And the raid drivers were installed with the new nvidia driver package. So if you use nlite, make sure you add the network drivers so you can go online right away in case your cdrom doesn't work like mine didn't.

DeepScience said:

Don't use the ata/ide drivers or the firewall network manager from nvidia. Both will crash your system.

Click to expand...

I used the ATA/IDE drivers from the 6.82 driver set. I did not install the Firewall manager so cannot respond to that issue.

I still had the issue of my large capacity SATA drive not being recognised by windows when connected to a SATA port in conjunction with a boot RAID0 array. No one could ever find a fix and I moved the drive over to the 3132 chipset and has worked ever since. I think this has to do with a) a firmware issue with large capacity Maxtor drives (Maxtor denied it and was of no consequence to the problem) or b) driver issue with the nForce chipset (my fav).

This is the only problem I've encountered so far with the chipset/and or drivers. Not that I'm totally familar with this beast at all. I'm still burning it in and have yet to overclock it. It has run dual Prime for 24hours straight, maximum temp 46*, I clocked 25k+ on 3D03, 10,574 on 3D05, and 89K on aquamark so my feeling is the system is very stable and lots of headroom. In fact I haven't even clocked the OZC3500's up to full freq, and I know they will run 450 @ 2-3-3-5, at least it did on my P4C800dlx.
I still also have an issue with the SLI/nVidia configuration and it's set up with my Sharp, but I've isolated that to the monitor/GPU communication pipeline. (It was hooked up to a NEC1980sx for the above referenced benchmarks.) Connected to a standard monitor theres no probs so it's a driver/set up issue and is taking some time to dial in the settings.