Integration of nForce SataRaid drivers

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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?

Hi Boris,
welcome to Vitali's Board!
I will try to help you.
Here are my suggestions:
1. When you want to install Windows XP onto a non-Raid hard disk drive (in your case the Raptor), you should neither integrate any nForce Raid drivers into a bootable XP CD nor hit F6 during Setup. After the complete XP installation you can install the nForce SataRaid drivers by hitting the SETUP.EXE of the nForce chipset driver package 6.85.
2. Before you are going to install the new 6.85 chipset drivers, you should reflash the old ASUS BIOS. I heard about the problems with a new ASUS BIOS and the instruction of ASUS to load the new chipset drivers before flashing a new BIOS version.

CU
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