A8N-SLI Prem and RAID Issue

[Phlerb]

I'll try to give as much detail as I can.

As you can see I have and Asus A8N-SLI Premium MB. I have 4 512MB sticks of RAM, a brand new Opteron 185 and a good Powersupply.

Since I just got the Opteron I thought I may play with the BIOS and get it a bit overclocked. I updated the chipset drivers to the latest non-beta's 6.65. I then ran Memtest86+ 1.70 and it passed with zero errors. Now comes my problem.

I used the Asus windows BIOS updater and updated to BIOS 1303, as that was the only one that was higher than the 1009 I had installed, even though it was a beta.

Now it passes the POST, but when it gets to the part where it wants to boot off the HDD, it hangs. I have 4 hard drives in the machine, 2 x SATA 120GB's in a RAID 0, an IDE 120 GB and a 500 GB in a SATA.

The BIOS sees all 4 drives. When I hit F4 at the beginning of the start up sequence I have a DOS like menu, but nothing seems to want to get my RAID back.

I have been successful in booting the computer to Ubuntu Live CD and can see the two non-raided drives, but the RAID drive shows as a 223.6 GB Volume, but it will not mount it. (Error says $MFT has invalid magic. failed to load $MFT: input/output error and then some more).

BTW, when I installed the new Processor, everything did boot and I saw the raido fine, even after a few shut downs and restarts.

My guess is somehow the new BIOS does not understand the RAID anymore. If anyone is familiar with this could you walk me through what needs to be done to get my XP box back up?

Thanks,
Phil

 

[hvrt]

Sounds like you have exactly the same problem as I had. Took me months to work it out. It's not a RAID issue. Its the number of drives. The RAID issue is probably because the right drivers are not loaded.

Stay with the 1009 unless you really have to use the later bioses. I think an Opteron will work - but won't be properly recognised.

Only the 1009 bios seems to work when you have multiple drives attached. (eg, mix of PATA, SATA and USB) Otherwise, it'll hang following the post event and before the OS boots. You have to power down or unplug SATA drives until the OS boots. Took me months to work this out. Finally downgraded from 1303 to 1009 and it now works a peach.

See here for the web page that finally filled the gaps

http://www.adamnoah.com/blog/?p=41

Downgrading the bios is a real pain as the later flash progs from the Asus web site don't allow a downgrade. You need to use either AsusUpdate 6.10.xx (if using Windows) not 7.xx.xx or use AWDFLASH 1.08 (if using DOS) to be able to flash 1009 over 1303.