Epox EP-9NPA+Ultra driver question...

[MechD]

Greetings all,

I just recently built a new system on an Epox EP-9NPA+Ultra mobo, and I have a couple of questions I would like to ask some of the more experienced users that have this board...

1) which if any drivers did you install off the CD? I installed the nforce chipset drivers (CD says 6.39 or 6.53 as the available options) and a driver that was called "AMD Athlon 64/AMD Sempron series processor driver." Shortly after this, I started experiencing hard locks if the system ran for longer than five minutes, and the next day my SATA hard drive had finally had enough and killed my XP install in a similar manner to the problem described in this thread. If you didn't use the drivers on the disk, do you recommend getting a newer version from the net(and if so, which version) , or do you just use the MS drivers?

2) is there a particular order you suggest for installing your drivers for this particular board? I remember one of my older Epox boards from the early Athlon days was VERY picky about the order a couple of drivers got installed (AGP port, Video Driver, Direct X) etc...

Thanks guys!

/me goes to run diagnostics on his poor Seagate...

 

[imported_Husky55]

My CD did not show any option on drivers version. It is 6.37.

My board version is 1.xxx

I would assume that your board is the newer version 2.xxx.

Please list your components as the devil is in the details.

There was a rather long thread about Nvidia driver version 6.66, I believe is the newest at this forum. It detailed pretty much all the problems and non problems people have with the 6.66 and 6.53 versions.

 

[bozack]

I installed all of them off of the CD and just in the default order...and then I upgraded to whatever the latest Nforce 4 drivers are...so far so good.

 

[RobbyG]

I didn't install any drivers from the CD, I downloaded the latest Nforce drivers (6.53 at the time) from Nvidia's site and used them. I also downloaded the latest Realtek Audio driver, but ended up using the Nvidia one after reading that the Nvidia ones use less cpu resources while sacrificing audio quality a bit.

The only thing I installed from the CD was the USDM monitoring utility.

 

[MechD]

Component list for the machine is as follows:

2x Corsair Ram Kit (2x512mb)

Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 250gig SATA HD

Epox EP-9NPA+ Ultra

eVGA 7800GTX Geforce

Fortron 500W Blue Storm PSU

AMD Athlon 64 3200+ Venice CPU

Then the standard floppy drive and a Toshiba DVD drive to load software from...

Also of note, XP setup claims it can no longer format the Seagate, because it "may be damaged" and chkdsk claims it has "unrecoverable errors"... Do you think I may have gotten a defective hard drive? I'm starting to think so...

 

[imported_Husky55]

MechD,

You have topnotch components. Although it is a distinct possibility that the HD could be bad, I do doubt it. The defect % of HDs is less than 1%. They are usually tested before being packaged. The day where we have to see if the HD spins before we declare they are OK are over.

I think your MBR might have been corrupted and/or damaged. It's happened to me. What a nightmare.

Do a google for fixmbr and fixboot. I also think your Nvidia driver for IDE/SATA is the cause of your problem. This also happened to me.

I finallly took the drive to another computer and formatted it and then reinstalled in my new system with the Nvida chipset and installed Windows.

Hope this help. Good luck!!

 

[grooge]

Is RAID enabled in BIOS for the connector you want to use? I would check that and some nforce board come with RAID enable by default in BIOS. Using the controller set as RAID, with only one drive, without and array defined is likely to cause data corrupton..

Normally, you should install Windows without the need of special drivers with your SATA HDD on the nvidia controler if set correctly (read anything but RAID). Then you can download the latest nforce drivers and install them. You dont have to install the IDE driver, unless you absolutly need ncq. NCQ can actually slow down thing if use in desktop environnement..