Win7 & nVRaid - Installation Guide

[Fernando 1]

@ aerosquid:
Welcome at nForcersHQ Forum!

Although you didn't mention it, I assume, that you are trying to get Win7 installed onto an RAID0 array.
If you have all your hdd's within an nForce RAID array, you should try to connect your optical drive (DVD-ROM/-Burner) to one of the Silicon Image SATA ports of your mainboard. These SATA ports should be set to non-RAID (=IDE) Mode.
Before you continue, you should check your BIOS regarding the boot order settings.
After having done that, you should try to restart the Win7 installation once more.

Good luck!
Fernando

[HerbA]

@ Fernando

... what can I say ....

.... just one more very happy user

whom you helped out of the struggle and to finally succeed

Thanks a thousend times and THUMBS UP !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

cead mile failte

[vitamint]

Hi there,
I'm new to this forum, but I've seen that here are a lot of people with the same problem than me.
I have an "Asus M2N-SLI E" and I'm trying (guess what) install "Windows 7" onto a RAID0. As far as I know I have a nforce4 chipset.

My problem is that I' trying bring my already existing "Windows 7 64BIT" installation from a single HDD to a RAID0 environment. I'm doing this with the help of an "Acronis" Disk Image. I enabled RAID before making the image and the RAID driver seemd to install fine (get listed within the device manager) but after setting up the raid and restoring win 7 back onto it, windows fails loading. It just stops in the middle of the boot up. The screen goes black and the computer restarts.

Any idea?

Best,
Vit

[Fernando 1]

@ vitamint:
Welcome at nForcersHQ Forum!

My problem is that I' trying bring my already existing "Windows 7 64BIT" installation from a single HDD to a RAID0 environment. I'm doing this with the help of an "Acronis" Disk Image. I enabled RAID before making the image and the RAID driver seemd to install fine (get listed within the device manager) but after setting up the raid and restoring win 7 back onto it, windows fails loading. It just stops in the middle of the boot up. The screen goes black and the computer restarts.

This procedure will not work with a RAID0 configuration.
You should do a fresh install of Windows 7 according to the start post of this thread.

Regards
Fernando

[vitamint]

Did so.
Worked in the end.
Cheers

[blufonci]

I'm also proud owner of nforce4 chipset, and had problems with windows7 drivers, until i found this forum that is. So i ll share my experience as well. Thank you Fernando and all others.

I have DFI LanParty nforce4 Ultra-D and i wanted windows7 on NVIDIA sata2 stripe.
Later i installed Corsair p64 SSD and wanted win7 there, along with NVIDIA sata2 mirror. I did not want to use generic drivers cause I noticed degrade of SSD’s performance using different chipset drivers, and i wanted SSD to give out its best.

Installing win7 on sata2 stripe:
I had to use „legacy patch boot cd“ to boot before win7 dvd, than loaded “SATA RAID drivers v9.98” from USB stick, step by step like described in Fernando’s “Windows 7 & nVRaid – installation guide”. windows-7-nvraid-installation-guide-t72447.html#p624691
I had no problems whatsoever, it worked like a charm. HDTach showed a little better performance of sata2 stripe in windows 7 than xp.

Installing win7 on sata2 SSD along with NVIDIA sata2 mirror array:
Doing clean install of system onto ssd went nice and smooth, pretty damn fast, 14min to be precise (win7 ultimate eng x86). Sata controller drivers installed were generic, win7 built-in. Everything worked well, except i couldn’t see or use sata2 mirrored raid, Device Manager saw array as separate and unusable drives.
Also when i ran HDTach on system SSD I noticed not as good results as on different system (s.775, ddr2, intel chipset) using same SSD as system drive; 30MB/s slower in “average read speed” to be precise. I also noticed that under Device Manager's „IDE ATA/ATAPI controllers“ SSD was assigned as Ultra DMA Mode 5, while 2 sata2 drives that should be in array were Ultra DMA Mode 6. Even after installing “SATA RAID drivers v9.98 manually” from within win7 (both sataraid and sata_ide drivers), array remained unusable and SSD wasn’t at full potential.

So I reinstalled win7 but used “legacy patch boot cd” to boot win7 like in first case. Then loaded “nForce_IDE_998_WHQL_for_Vista_32bit_packed_by_Fernando” from USB stick, again like in Fernando’s “Windows 7 & nVRaid – installation guide”.
When windows booted first time there were my “NVIDA nForce Serial ATA Controller” and “NVIDIA nForce RAID Controller” drivers installed (version 5.10.2600.998, date 9.08.2007) and my array was finally visible. But again HDTach showed low results for SSD performance (180MB/s average read speed).
Later that day “windows update” notified that they found optional update for “NVIDIA – system – nForce4 PCI-Express Root Port” and I installed it, rebooted, and did benchmark on SSD again. This time it showed 210MB/s “average read speed” as it should, with blazing latency of 0.1ms.
So I m pretty happy how it turned out.

I must add that whole system now with SSD really flies! It was great with sata2 stripe (even with 3 hitachi drives) but this is really a new dimension of super responsive and fast system browsing. But today, as it is, it’s still pretty expensive pleasure, imo.
Pretty awesome for a 5 year old motherboard, gj DFI!

My system is
DFI LanParty nForce4 Ultra-D
Thermaltake Toughpower 600W
Athlon64 x2 4200+ Socket 939 2,9GHz Toledo
2x1GB SUPERTALENT DDR466 2,5-3-7-3 128-bit
Saphire Radeon HD4890 1GB DDR5 256-bit
Corsair SSD P64
2x160GB Hitachi sata2 in NVIDIA MIRROR

good luck all

[Fernando 1]

@ blufonci:
Thank you very much for your interesting and detailed report about your procedure about how to get Windows 7 perfectly running on an SSD with your 5 year old nForce4 mainboard inclusive an existing RAID configuration. That is really great - congratulations!
After having read your post, I have done a Google search for the “NVIDIA – system – nForce4 PCI-Express Root Port” and found >this< thread.
So it seems, that you didn't get a driver by Windows Update, but just a small INF (=text) file with a content like this (or similar):

Code: Select all

; Copyright (C) 2004  NVIDIA Corporation

[Version]
Signature="$WINDOWS NT$"
Class=System
ClassGuid={4D36E97D-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}
Provider=%NVDA%
CatalogFile=nf4pcie.cat
DriverVer=07/27/2004, 5.1.2600.0445

[Manufacturer]
%NVDA%=NVDA_NF4

[NVDA_NF4]
%NF4PCIE% = NVPCI_DRV, PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_005D

[NVPCI_DRV]
Include=machine.inf
Needs=PCI_DRV

[NVPCI_DRV.Services]
Include=machine.inf
Needs=PCI_DRV.Services

[NVPCI_DRV.HW]
Include=machine.inf
Needs=PCI_DRV.HW

[Strings]
NVDA="NVIDIA"
NF4PCIE="nForce4 PCI-Express Root Port"

Thanks again!
Fernando

[nForcer]

Hey F1, another thankyou for you (via email)

Please forward my thanks to Fernando 1. His installation guide made it possible for me to install Windows 7 64-bit on the RAID 0 array of my MSI Neo4 Platinum motherboard.
--Dean L. Surkin

[madmanmarz]

I am so beaten. This has been fail after fail and error after error every step of the way. After figuring out that I have to install Vista and upgrade from it to 7, i decided to give raid another go. I was happy to find that the drivers on page one were recognized by windows and my RAID 0 NVRAID using a DFI ultraII-M2 (NFORCE 4 ULTRA AMD) config seemed to be working fine. I was using my oem vista disk and started the install process but as soon as it gets to the extracting part, i get the file missing error 0x80070017. now my disk is a little old and scratched so i'm currently dling the image. I am also currently inst. vista on a single drive to see if i still get the error.

The boot order listed the raid drive first, the usb was unplugged and refreshed, computer was not overclocked, i tried the 7.3 modded drivers and the .rar is corrupt and windows does not show the raid drive when I use those

please help

ok, sweet. the cd install on one drive didn't work either so i really hope that's the issue...seems to error right around when the cd starts spinning. i'll confirm once i have vista re-downloaded

i am going to cry, the vista image is 100mb too big for my thumb drive.

[madmanmarz]

Since those who did the 29.99 school deal upgrade for Win7 might find themselves in the same predicament, here you go.

Once again this is for a DFI NF UltraII-M2 motherboard which has the Nforce4 Ultra AMD chipset. I had to use SATA 3/4 because SATA 1 broke off.
So basically what I ended up doing was:
Download Vista Home Premium 64 and mount on USB drive. (CD gave 0x80070017 error from scratches)
Uplug all drives except for install/RAID.
Setup RAID 0 as boot disk in NVRAID, and put at top of load order in BIOS.
In BIOS, set RAID enable and the appropriate disks enable (just SATA, not IDE), in my case, the last two options.
As a side note, had no problems installing heavily overclocked, so long as it's stable.
Start install, load SATA drivers, finish, then load RAID drivers from first post (9.98 I think).
Once new drive is recognized (might have to hit refresh), delete/format it and make a new partition.
I put the drivers on the install disk in a folder so I didn't have to remove any drives, if you put them on a separate disk, remove the disk and hit refresh before installing W7 on your boot drive.
Let the setup do its thing, then I activated Win with my Key.
Then I made a Win7 boot disk, and upgraded from Vista.
NOTE: IF YOU HAVE A KEY FOR A SPECIFIC VERSION OF WINDOWS 7, MAKE YOU YOU DELETE EI.CFG so you can choose which version to install. In my case I HAD to upgrade from Vista to Win 7 Home Premium for my keys to work. Tried giving Microsoft a call and no other way would work (stupid).
If you're dumb like me and forget to delete ei.cfg and end up installing ultimate, you cannot "upgrade" (downgrade) to your version unless you go into regedit and change product id stuff to HomePremium from Ultimate. I put in my old Prod ID # as well. Search google for windows 7 downgrade home premium and there's a win/forum thread on it.
As I type Windows has just finished restarting for the last time and all is well.

So, my last question is, which drivers should I install for the rest of the Nforce stuff and is there any new drivers I can update to once W7 is installed?