Integration of nForce SataRaid drivers

[Boris]

Hello!

I guess, the SataRaid drivers is a common pain in the neck...
My situation is very close to what Gisborne has described.

I have:
ASUS A8N SLI Deluxe motherboard
1 WD Raptor HDD 36Gb
2 Seagate Barracuda 320Gb HDDs

The idea was to have WinXP on Raptor and RAID 0 on the two 320Gb HDDs.

Any attempts to get nVidia RAID drivers installed (diskette + F6 during setup; incorporation of the drivers by nLite) resulted in a smooth install of WinXP Pro and exactly the same endless reboots Gisborne has described above.

In perfect accordance with his story, omitting the RAID drivers during XP installation resulted in working OS, but no RAID disk (no surprise!).

Googling "ASUS A8N SLI Deluxe RAID" revealed an interesting feature:
the latest BIOS versions (1012-1017.beta) requiere nVidia chipset drivers to be installed - othervise, the system crashes. (http://support.asus.com/download/downloa...uage=en-us)

I was stupid enough to start my attempts by upgrading to the latest BIOS 1016. Does anybody know if this could be the reason for the problem? It sounds strange that you CANNOT install WinXP with BIOS 1012 or higher...

I am thinking of flashing the BIOS back to 1007 and giving it another try. Does anybody have suggestion for other ways to overcome this issue?

Regards,

Boris.