Reformating/reinstalling on my A8N-SLI system

[TheNiceGuy]

I wrestled alot with this 2 and a half months ago. Can anybody in the know give me some advice?
System as below. I don't plan to use RAID, and I understand NCQ is still a no-no.

 

[ohnnyj]

I don't quite understand what you are asking but I will take a shot in the dark and assume you are asking which chipset drivers to install. If this is the case you should load up XP just like you would normally, then install SP2 and any updates, then the latest nForce4 chipset drivers form nVidia's site, and lastly the latest official nVidia Forceware drivers from their site (I wouldn't play around with betas until your system is stable). You could also update your BIOS to the latest final release which I think is 1004, but I wouldn't do that until everything else is up and running and stable (that is unless you are having instabilit already, in which case try a new BIOS to see if it helps).

 

[TheNiceGuy]

Thank you Jonny-
I think thats what I was after. The first time I setup I installed everything on the Mobo CD, and ended up with all kinds of conflicts and errors - which I kind of sorted out. And I know different systems have had different conflicts with different drivers - so... i was hopeing to avaoid a repeat and do things right - from the start. Only installing drivers others like yourself know to be compatable with my hardware.

 

[TheNiceGuy]

HI Jonny-
Ok, last night after i posted the above, I insatlled all the newest drivers I had (on my data drive) to C drive. I am a bit worried about these as They are from 3 different sources I had to track down myself - Leadtek, Asus, and nVidia. I hope they aren't conflicting or double installing some of the drivers. Anyways, they are as follows, and I installed them in this order:
1) Chipset_64
2) nforce_6.39
3) 66.93 (nvidia corp)
4) W2K_ALL_6703 Leadtek
5) nTune 2005 v.20 (application)

At this point my internet connection was recognized, and I was able to update Windows (only a few updates neede as I have MCE 2005). Now somewhere along the line of drivers and updates, the "NTLDR" error disappeared, and all was well. I also updated BIOS from 1003 to 1004 at this point. I had installed NV firewall (I think I have to,tostall the interent drivers) but completely disabled it due to using XP firewall. As usualattempts to install my KAV failed.BIOS always asks for RAID at startup.
Anyway, this mornig I turn it on to write this message to you, and I get the original "Disk read eror" in BIOS startup. After disabling Silicon SATA controller in BIOS, it changes to an "NTLDR" error. I was only able to boot windows by using a boot disk.


This NTLDR error came out of nowhere. I've been up and running for about 6 weeks. I have no partitions on either disk. The only possible causes I can think of are: installing 2 'all in one' codec packs, and then trying to uninstall them. After install, some of my other programs (SoundForge, nTune, etc) required reinstall before I could use them again, due to missing files; I turned off Silicon SATA controler in BIOS to get rid of the RAID options at startup; I had to system restore after Windows update due to disk instability about 2 weeks ago.
That's really all I can think of, besides having 2 sets of drivers installed accidentaly a long time ago, as I mentioned above.


Any idea whats going on?