[mjswooosh]

dale5605, on Sep 7 2005, 01:50 PM, said:

mjswoosh, I also get those errors when I tried it the one time I did it that way. However after I installed those drivers I did not experience that reboot problem you are speaking of. Usually that problem only occurs after windows installs and you never make it into windows in the first place. I would recommend only adding in the nvatabus.inf and raidtool folder into your sataraid directory and leaving out the other stuff. You won't get the device manager errors that way, I really only suggested that as a *possible* solution to people having lots of problems. But I would just stick with the aforementioned. 

Fernando you mentioned that windows is install the wrong ide driver being the cause for the problem.

I know I remove ALL drivers with nlite, this includes all the various ide drivers and the scsi/raid drivers.

Does this have anything to do with it?

I'm just curious as to what is causing these different results to be achieved.


Again, I can get my raid array working fine with nlite 1.0 b6 with no "handmade" changes.

Some things that may or may not be significant.

-Using nvidia 6.66 drivers
-Using nvraid 4.81 drivers loaded on my mobo
-Remove ALL drivers with nLite and integrate all my own
-Do not check "oem preinstall" box
-Use DefaultHide unattended method
-Integrate RVM1.3.1 + WMP10 + Addons


Oh and I didn't realize the 6/23 BIOS has the newer nvraid version because I didn't see it mentioned anywhere in the changes. I am considering flashing to that BIOS but everything is working the way it is now and I don't really feel like messing it up. 
<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

OK, my latest attempt at using Dale's suggested method actually WORKS. Very little was different from the previous attempt, all of the settings in nLite were identical, added drivers was the same, etc.... But it caused the re-boot problem before, and this time it does not.

This is about as predictable as the weather, stock-market, and my girlfriend!



Dale, it's good to hear you experienced the same "missing .dll" install errors and/or the BSOD errors...as they say, misery loves company...hee hee... so at least now I know it's (probably) not a problem compounded by some of my brand-new equipment going tits up...

When you say to only include the nvatabus.inf and the raidtool folder, can you clarify? I think what you must mean is to *not* add the additional files such as nvata.inf, nvata.sys, etc.... Can you list the contents of your sataraid folder just so I can compare it to mine? That way I can make sure I'm not leaving anything in there that might be causing the still-present device manager question marks/errors/wizard pop up boxes/blah blah...

I took your advice and had nLite remove the SCSI/RAID drivers in nLite's "Drivers" section and the 4 separate IDE drivers in the "Hardware" section. I'm betting this has something to do with how this method seems to work (at least some of the time...am still not sure why it worked this time and not the last time...)

EDIT: After all of this I just had to laugh my butt off uncontrollably for awhile. Why does it suddenly feel like my $2000+ gaming rig is being held together by gum, string, and duct tape? THANKS NVIDIA!

This post has been edited by mjswooosh: 07 September 2005 - 03:18 PM

[Fernando 1]

There are only small differences between that, what Dale did and that, what works for me and a lot of other people. We all used the [OemInfFiles] method, which was integrated the first time into nLite by version Beta6.
The problems Mjswoosh was writing about, occured during the first (TEXTMODE) part of the installation. During this setup part the installation procedure of Dale and me is nearly identical, because we have very similar hardware.

Quote

Fernando you mentioned that windows is install the wrong ide driver being the cause for the problem.
I know I remove ALL drivers with nlite, this includes all the various ide drivers and the scsi/raid drivers.
Does this have anything to do with it?

It really can have something to do with it, if you removed the Microsoft STANDARD-IDE-ATA/ATAPI-CONTROLLER, because this wrong driver is installed by Windows Setup instead of the correct NVIDIA nForce IDE Performance driver NVATABUS.SYS.
Is it really possible to delete this driver by nLite? If yes, that would be a good idea anyway.

This post has been edited by Fernando 1: 07 September 2005 - 11:52 PM

[dale5605]

@mj

My folder looks like this (except it should be WinXP not Win2k )

http://teamicenine.c...otag/nvraid.bmp

@Fernando

I simply select everything in the "drivers" section of nLite to remove.

Oh and I had a brain fart and thought the ide crap was included in there, sorry about that.

Besides selecting to remove all drivers I also select to remove these under the "hardware support" section.

ALI IDE Bus Driver
CMD IDE Bus Driver
Intel IDE BUS Driver
Toshiba IDE Bus Driver
VIA IDE Bus Driver

Perhaps removing those things is what allows me to successfully install without the reboot loop.

[Fernando 1]

dale5605, on Sep 7 2005, 10:45 PM, said:

My folder looks like this (except it should be WinXP not Win2k  )
http://teamicenine.c...otag/nvraid.bmp

The raidtool folder will not be necessary.

But now to the driver removal by nLite:
The longer I think about what Dale has written the more I believe, that the removal of certain drivers could be a very easy way to solve a couple of nVRaid problems.
Tomorrow I will test these things.

[nuhi]

dale5605, you are onto something, by removing BUS Driver nlite breaks default Windows signature for their IDE drivers and by that it makes it equal to other third party txtmode drivers...thus nvraid gains priority...now if Fernando 1 you can confirm ?

This post has been edited by nuhi: 07 September 2005 - 04:29 PM

[FatalSaviour]

Thx for the reply Fernando. Is it not everyone getting this exact same problem then? It's very bizarre - without making any handmade changes - simply slipstreaming SP2 onto an original XP source folder, adding's Ryan's latest updates, and then integrating all the nvidia drivers (E'net, SATA, RAID etc), I seem to have a perfectly healthy OS at the end of installation (give or take the odd random reboot). I stress however that I can go through hours and hours of games, putting my CPU at full load almost constantly, yet the system's perfectly stable. Just letting it idle however will indefinitely result in a crash at some point, usually within a couple of hours.
Update: For some reason, when transcoding avi's using Nero VisionExpress to put to DVD, it can never complete a DVD, whenever I get back to the machine, 1.5 hours later or so, it's rebooted itself. I'm not 100% sure whether this is related to the initial reboots you guys seem to be having or not.

Not sure how you guys diagnose these things exactly, if it helps, i can post my presets etc, both for those of you that can't get you're systems to work, and for me, who's fondly remembering the days I last had a stable system...it was a AMD XP 2000+, with a known faulty 512mb of RAM, which didn't bother it in the least, and an FX5200. Oh the memories...

[Fernando 1]

FatalSaviour, on Sep 8 2005, 04:07 AM, said:

It's very bizarre - without making any handmade changes - simply slipstreaming SP2 onto an original XP source folder, adding's Ryan's latest updates, and then integrating all the nvidia drivers (E'net, SATA, RAID etc), I seem to have a perfectly healthy OS at the end of installation (give or take the odd random reboot).
Not sure how you guys diagnose these things exactly, if it helps, i can post my presets etc

Please help us and others to find the reason for the different handling of nVRaid systems by the Windows Setup routine on different systems and/or different nLite settings.

Very interesting are the following details:
1. What sort of Raid system do you have (nForce3/nForce4, Sata/Pata)?
2. Did you remove any drivers by nLite? If yes, which ones?
3. Which version of the nForce chipset driver package did you use?
4. Which driver subfolder (SATARAID/PATARAID) did you integrate as Textmode driver?
5. Have you made any modification within the driver subfolder (by editing the TXTSETUP.OEM or copying other files into the folder), before you used it?
6. You have written, that you integrated SATA and RAID. Did you integrate them by choosing the both required drivers after pointing to the SATARAID /PATARAID subfolder or did you integrate them within 2 different steps?

[dale5605]

Well since fatalzaviour was able to integrate with no extra changes like me he probably removed those ide and scsi drivers? I'm hoping that is the case because that would confirm this maybe being the solution.

But I believe the problem he is speaking of is completely unrelated. Fatal, set your options to not automatically reboot when the system crashes. Then when it does crash you will see the blue screen and then note what that error message is. That will point you in the direction of the problem. But the rebooting we are talking about with regards to nvraid integration is just after the install of windows, not after windows has already been up and running for a few hours.

[Fernando 1]

dale5605, on Sep 8 2005, 12:12 PM, said:

Well since fatalzaviour was able to integrate with no extra changes like me he probably removed those ide and scsi drivers? I'm hoping that is the case because that would confirm this maybe being the solution.

Within the next days I will try to find out the driver or driver family which has to be removed by nLite to prevent the conflict with not WHQL-certified NVIDIA Raid drivers.

But to make it clear: The removal of all or a lot of the standard drivers from the Windows CD would not be a good idea for everyone. If Mjswoosh really removed MS standard drivers, he should not be surprised, that the Windows setup routine has interrupted the installation by asking for several DLL-files and that he has seen yellow question marks in his hardware device manager.

The best solution for our problem is to find an easy way for everyone to integrate the not WHQL-certified nVraid drivers into a bootable complete Windows XP CD with the option, that it contains all standard drivers and all standard features. People, who are using tools like nLite, want to be free in their decision, what they want and what they don't want, and a lot of people change their mind about these things.........

CU
Fernando

[mjswooosh]

Fernando 1, on Sep 8 2005, 05:13 AM, said:

dale5605, on Sep 8 2005, 12:12 PM, said:

Well since fatalzaviour was able to integrate with no extra changes like me he probably removed those ide and scsi drivers? I'm hoping that is the case because that would confirm this maybe being the solution.

Within the next days I will try to find out the driver or driver family which has to be removed by nLite to prevent the conflict with not WHQL-certified NVIDIA Raid drivers.

But to make it clear: The removal of all or a lot of the standard drivers from the Windows CD would not be a good idea for everyone. If Mjswoosh really removed MS standard drivers, he should not be surprised, that the Windows setup routine has interrupted the installation by asking for several DLL-files and that he has seen yellow question marks in his hardware device manager.

The best solution for our problem is to find an easy way for everyone to integrate the not WHQL-certified nVraid drivers into a bootable complete Windows XP CD with the option, that it contains all standard drivers and all standard features. People, who are using tools like nLite, want to be free in their decision, what they want and what they don't want, and a lot of people change their mind about these things.........

CU
Fernando
<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

My latest attempt using the OemInfFile method + removing the built-in SCSI/IDE drivers seems to work (at least on the surface).

I believe the reason this attempt finally worked for me (& the last 2 attempts using the OemInfFile method did not) is because I did not use any of the SATARAID files at all...I only used PATARAID files when integrating with nLite and also in the OEMDIR directory. Since all of these files appear to be identical I am not sure why it would make any difference. However, this is the only difference in my method between the previous 2 times that did not work and this time that did finally work. I will re-test this again in my next nLite build by using the SATARAID folder files and just copying the correct nvatabus.inf over from the PATARAID folder and see if it results in the "missing .dll files" problem again.

1. The system seems to correctly identify the hard drive as NVIDIA STRIPE. I looked at the device driver in Device Manager and it appears to be WINDOWS\System32\DRIVERS\nvraid.sys.

I loaded up drivers for my wi-fi PCI card and took some time to transfer various files and apps over from another PC this system. No problems with that or basic computer operation.

2. However, Device Manager shows SCSI & RAID Controllers as "Unknown Device". I tried the "Update Driver" option several times but with no luck. Regardless of which RAID driver I try to load, it tells me every time that it cannot load the driver for the device.

3. It seems that trying to load the drivers for this "Unknown Device" and/or trying to remove it from Device Manager causes the "endless re-boot" problem. This particular system load was working perfectly and I re-booted several times without incident...BUT after I tried to load the drivers for the "Unknown Device" and/or when I tried to remove the device and then re-boot it started endless re-boots again.

Fernando & Dale...do either or both of your Device Managers show the SCSI & RAID Controller as "Unknown Device"? I'm wondering if removing the standard SCSI/RAID drivers with nLite causes this Device Manager issue? Or does your Device Manager correctly display NVRAID?

Time to try another slipstream/re-load....

This post has been edited by mjswooosh: 08 September 2005 - 01:34 PM

[mjswooosh]

DrTweak, on Jul 19 2005, 10:54 PM, said:

I have tried this with the SATA drivers from Nvidia Release 6.53, it worked , Motherboard is an A8N-Sli Deluxe. just needed to change nvatabus.inf to nvraid.inf and it worked without a hitch
<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

What do you mean you "changed" the nvatabus.inf to nvraid.inf?

In case DrTweak doesn't check back any time soon, does anyone else care to let me know what he meant by this?

[FatalSaviour]

Ok, some information that may be useful to you then:
It's an Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe (nForce 4 SLI chipset), and the raid array is a RAID 0 SATA with 2x 80gig Seagate 7200.7s. I'm using the 1013 bios, which has the nvraid 4.84 bios.
I didn't remove any drivers with nLite, not MS or any others.
I used Forceware AMD 6.66 (32-bit).
I integrated the SATAraid subfolder for the Textmode driver.
I made no modification to the driver subfolder (I was going to edit the Txtsetup.oem as you suggested, but thought it looked like a bit too much hassle, and thought I'd give it a whirl and see if it worked without editing first.
I can't quite remember, but I'm 90% sure I just pointed nlite to the Sata_ide drivers first, and then the Sataraid drivers 2nd (I need both sets, as I also have a Maxtor 250gig on the 3rd controller for storage). I did select all the options on nlite, tweaking etc. but for the most part I left these unchanged and just skipped past them. I added my cd key, network name etc. but didn't make any huge changes. Just let me know if I can provide any more information other than this.

On a side note, is there a way to get rid of the US language, and just install the UK bits? I can add the UK, and tell it to use it, but I can't seem to find the US language to remove in nlite. I'm thinking it uses the US language during install, but I'd like to remove it if possible.

This post has been edited by FatalSaviour: 08 September 2005 - 02:58 PM

[FatalSaviour]

I think Dr Tweak means that he just changed the name of the .inf file.

[FatalSaviour]

Btw, I completely sympathise with you woosh. It seems that no (semi) cutting edge system that I put together these days is completely problem free. It's rather annoying....

[dale5605]

@fatalsavior, that's nvidia for you...

@Fernando
I seriously doubt his "missing dll" problem is related to my method in any way.

Using my method I get absolutely no missing file errors whatsoever, no problems with windows, no errors or question marks or anything weird in the device manager, nothing wrong whatsoever.

And why do you think there is any harm in removing those windows ide drivers? It doesn't hurt the system like you imply it would. My computer runs better without them. If you have a nvidia chipset why would you want to keep VIA, Intel, CMD, etc. drivers in there? They do no good at all on a nvidia chipset, and you could have absolutely no use for them whatsoever. So I fail to see the concern here.

[FatalSaviour]

I see both POVs. For me, removing all other IDE drivers seems like a harmless exercise, if I'm going to install a new board, then it's likely I'll format and use a fresh version of windows. With the A8N-sli deluxe, it's unlikely I'll ever need any more storage controllers, so I'm not going to miss them.
For people that don't know what they're doing however, I suppose it could lead to problems, removing more than necessary, dependencies on other system devices. IDE controller drivers are one of the things I'd feel very comfortable removing, it's almost a dead cert you won't be needing them in the future. Is there any disadvantage at all of removing them?

[Fernando 1]

mjswooosh, on Sep 8 2005, 08:14 PM, said:

Fernando & Dale...do either or both of your Device Managers show the SCSI & RAID Controller as "Unknown Device"?  I'm wondering if removing the standard SCSI/RAID drivers with nLite causes this Device Manager issue?  Or does your Device Manager correctly display NVRAID?

1. As long as I integrated the nVraid drivers by [OemInfFiles]-method, I have never had any yellow question mark or an "Unknown Device" within the Device Manager. The Device Manager always showed the correct NVIDIA nForce4 Serial ATA Controller and the correct NVIDIA nForce Raid Class Controller.
2. Today I have tested to integrate the nVRaid drivers with nLite Beta6 without any "handmade" changes posted within post 1, but with the removal of the standard SCSI/Raid drivers by nLite. Result: Endless reboots. So this is not the trick for an easy nVRaid integration for everyone.
As a second test I just deleted the ATAPI.SYS (as atapi.sy_) from the I386 folder and the standard SCSI/Raid drivers. Result: Endless reboots again.

So the search for the exact combination of removing special drivers and doing special settings to prevent any "handmade" changes is not yet finished.

[nuhi]

It's not SCSI drivers that are connected, it's the IDE drivers.
Best would be to remove both.

[Fernando 1]

nuhi, on Sep 8 2005, 11:20 PM, said:

It's not SCSI drivers that are connected, it's the IDE drivers.
Best would be to remove both.

I cannot find a special option to remove the IDE drivers by nLite. There was only a combination of SCSI drivers and something else and I removed that combination.

[mjswooosh]

FatalSaviour, on Sep 8 2005, 01:01 PM, said:

I think Dr Tweak means that he just changed the name of the .inf file.
<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Why bother doing that? The missing file that is needed to do the install this way is called nvatabus.inf, right? So, I don't understand why he'd rename it...