LanParty UT nF4 SLI-DR Expert issues

[fltaylor]

About 2 months ago, I upgraded to a DFI nF4 SLI-DR Expert board. Things were running relatively smoothly until about a week or so ago. Having not reformatted when upgrading (just removed all the drivers for the old motherboard), I decided that would be the best course of action. Things have gone downhill from there.

The biggest problem I'm having is data corruption in my SATA drives. Someone from the Rage3d boards pointed me here to get Mei's driver remix, but the links were broken, so no luck there.

Secondly, my CD and DVD drives aren't always reading properly, generating errors during installs.

I'm also getting a windows registry error on startup that may or may not be related - it just says that it had to restore the registry from an older file or log, and that it was successful, nothing more. Many times when this happens, when I go to shut down, I'll be left staring at the blue windows backgroud, and I'll have to shut it down manually.

If anyone can give me any suggestions on how to fix this, or point me towards a better set of drivers other than the ones that DFI offers, I'd appreciate it.

[wardog]

Nice board

List your hardware, including current drivers in use, BIOS revision, CPU, RAM, OC settings if any, all drives, and your PSU. Please be specific when listing 'em.

MEI's releases can be found HERE but to me it doesn't sound like this will cure your ills.

[fltaylor]

No overclocking until it's stable, but here are the H/W and driver specs.

CPU: AMD 3500+ Newcastle 2.2 Ghz
RAM: 2x1Gb Mushkin DDR 400
Hard Drives: Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320 Gb SATA
Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 200 Gb SATA
Western Digital Caviar 160 Gb SATA
Western Digital Caviar 120 Gb IDE (Primary Drive)
PSU: Antec NeoHE 500w
Video: eVGA GeForece 8800 GTS
Drivers: nVidia nForce chipset drivers v. 6.86s
Bios version 6

I haven't tried Mei's drivers yet, maybe after work today. Specifically, I was instructed to get her 6.10 remix and turn off read caching and ncq on all my drives. I'm not entirely sure what NCQ is though, and I haven't found any way to set those using the drivers I have now, so I figured it'd be something that came with the remix.

[wardog]

"Bios version 6" ?

Have you recently changed or added any HW, or is this just starting out of the blue?

If you don't already, there needs power plugged into the floppy 4pin directly above the upper PCIe slot, towards the front. It uses a standard floppy power plug, and is keyed to fit one way.

Is the bios correctly setting up your Newcastles voltage at 1.5V? And speaking of this, how's your other voltages reading?

Along with the 24pin ATX there needs to be the 8pin EPS12V connected. The Neo500 has these and their referred to as the 4+4 plugs, or EPS12V.

Ram should be in the Orange slots, and it might not hurt to put 'em at 2.65v-2.7v.

To enable/disable NCQ it's found under the Controllers tab in Dev Mgr.

[fltaylor]

Yes, this is a relatively recent upgrade. I haven't flashed the bios yet because I couldn't get the floppy drive working, and version 6 was the only thing I could see on boot up.

After double checking all the settings in the bios, yes, they're all set to the voltages that you suggested, and are reading at those levels +/- .05 volts or so.

I -did- however rearrange the RAM to be in both orange slots.

Didn't have time to change much else, maybe tomorrow.

[wardog]

Good morning,

Ok. Don't flash the BIOS, at least just yet. Until it's stable you don't want it freaking out in the middle of flashing. It's seemingly reading what you have now, so there's no point in risking a bad flash.

You using JBOD with any combination of those HD's? Without me looking at what HD's there are SATA, are they conncected to the NF4 controller next to the FDD cable connection, or are they connected to the SiL3114 controller located by the Power and Rest pushbuttons?

Now that the ram is in the orange slots, go in the BIOS and set their timings manually.

The chipset fan is notorious for failing. When in use is the fan hot to the touch? It should be warm but not hot.

Check that the power connections I mention are all connected. Alot of people incorrectly assume the FDD 4pin connection is for powering SLI setups. It's not, and needs connected regardless of the number of video cards.

The part of Registry rebuilding. After it repairs, have you gone into Device Manager to see if it's inserting any of your old MB's HW from a prior to moving saved System Restore Point? Look closely that the driver revisions used by the MB's HW is in fact the versions YOU installed after removing all the old MB's drivers. Might also try forcing this by executing the 6.86 driver install again.

Is it possible to back up your data and do a fresh install? Lord knows you have the available HD space to store it on.

[fltaylor]

All 3 SATA drives are connected to the NF4 controller, no RAID setup at all. After the reformat, I couldn't get Windows to recognize the drives that were hooked up to the SiL3114 (I had the WD and the smaller Seagate hooked up to it), or the controller itself. I finally got the controller recognized, but only after I had switched all the drives to the NF4 controller, so I haven't switched them back yet.

RAM is set to 2-3-6-2 1T (stock). This is the first board I've had that I could change anything with the RAM aside from being single/dual channel, so until I learn more, I'd like to leave them be.

The chipset fan is running fine, no noted abnormal temperatures.

I made the same mistake regarding the 4 pin connection, though I remember reading somewhere in the manual that it wasn't required if you weren't running SLI. I've hooked it up anyway.

The registry rebuilding and abnormal shutdowns have ceased since I changed the drivers to the nVidia 6.86 set, but I went ahead and double checked the Device manager, and everything appears as it should be.

As far as doing a fresh install, I can do that, however I'm concerned about the CD/DVD drive issue and the data corruption. When I first did the reformat/reinstall, it failed the first time, and I had to start over, though I can't remember the exact error. I also tried reinstalling one of my games (Dawn of War) from DVD, and it could not read all the files properly. I've tried running the install from the DVD drive on my laptop, networked through to the desktop, and I get the same errors. Installing from the laptop's DVD drive to the laptop works fine, so that leads me to believe that its not my DVD drive failing, but something else.

Quick edit before work - Just downloaded Mei's drivers, then transferred them to the desktop. The 60mb file extracted fine, but failed installation due to corruption. Glee!