Asus P5B; any common problems when installing?

[dagwoood]

I'm changing my motherboard to a P5B and I wandered whether there were any common problems when installing/setting-up one of these boards.

I'll be using my current CPU and memory, 1 IDE hard drive, 1xSATA hard drive, 1xSATA DVD-RW and an 8600GTS.

Any other hints or tips would be welcome.

TIA, dagwoood.

 

[Big.Wayne]

No its pretty straightforward, you can download all the latest drivers from ASUS and off you go. There is only one thing I don't like about this board and thats the sound-drivers for the onboard audio, somehow after you have installed them it makes browsing folders a bit laggy sometimes, hard to explain but as a workaround I just switched off the windows 'clicky' browsing sounds.

Um what else, you can flash your BIOS from inside the BIOS and from a USB drive too. If you overclock your system like mad and get to the point where you can't even boot the PC then instead of resetting the BIOS just turn off the power to the board at the PSU and after 5-10 seconds it will reset itself, neat feature.

Sometimes when u have made adjustments in the BIOS (voltages etc) and save and exit the machine will do a double reboot, this is normal and nothing to worry about.

Also if you have any slow fans connected to the onboard fan headers it can take a while to get into the BIOS health page (the bit that shows cpu temps and stuff).

Thats it for now, give us a shout if you need any help!

 

[chaosophy]

Any chance you can replace the IDE drive for another SATA one? It'd make things easier as then you can totally disable the Jmicron controller and just use the Intel one. If it's just a storage drive maybe stick it in a USB caddie?

Also decide what mode you want to run the Intel SATA in before you start installing windows. i.e if you want to run ACHI or RAID you need to make sure you have the drivers ready.

I originally set up my P5B-D in IDE/enhanced mode and later managed to frig it over to ACHI. Seems to work ok but a bit messy doing it that way.

 

[dagwoood]

Thanks for the tips and offers of help guys, it's appreciated.

Any chance you can replace the IDE drive for another SATA one? It'd make things easier as then you can totally disable the Jmicron controller and just use the Intel one. If it's just a storage drive maybe stick it in a USB caddie?

My IDE drive is going to have XP on it, it's not a storage drive; there's no chance of my swapping it or getting a new one either as it's only a couple of months old.

 

[dagwoood]

Also decide what mode you want to run the Intel SATA in before you start installing windows. i.e if you want to run ACHI or RAID you need to make sure you have the drivers ready.

I originally set up my P5B-D in IDE/enhanced mode and later managed to frig it over to ACHI. Seems to work ok but a bit messy doing it that way.

I've been thinking about the above and I would appreciate it if someone could clarify something for me please.

I don't want to install my floppy drive in my new case, so I plan on installing XP onto my IDE drive and set my SATA hard drive to IDE enhanced in the BIOS. If I do this and when XP is installed, can I then install the ACHI driver, reboot into the BIOS and set my SATA drive to ACHI mode? Can anyone see any problems doing it this way?

TIA, dagwoood.

 

[KIA]

Why not place the RAID drivers on a USB thumb drive?

 

[chaosophy]

I've been thinking about the above and I would appreciate it if someone could clarify something for me please.

I don't want to install my floppy drive in my new case, so I plan on installing XP onto my IDE drive and set my SATA hard drive to IDE enhanced in the BIOS. If I do this and when XP is installed, can I then install the ACHI driver, reboot into the BIOS and set my SATA drive to ACHI mode? Can anyone see any problems doing it this way?

TIA, dagwoood.

as mentioned maybe look at using a thumb stick or some such, should work. Or possibly make a slipstreamed install CD with something like nlite.


though if you are using the IDE drive to boot XP and then the SATA as a second drive just set it to ACHI from the off. You won't be able to see the 2nd drive until windows is up and running and you can install the ACHI drivers but it shouldn't stop you installing windows and getting the PC running.

The only thing that may happen is your CD will probably grab d: as the drive letter but you can reassign that to e: or whatever if you want your 2nd HDD to be d:

If you do want to set the SATA to IDE enh and switch it to ACHI later the easiest way I found to do it is to download the drivers and extract them. that bits a bit of a pain as you need to use cmd line switches to extract the package. Once extracted you can right click the relevant disk controller in device manager, browse to the extracted files and pick the ACHI driver for your controller. Reboot and it'll pick it up.

First way would be best IMO but if you want to go for the 2nd let me know and I'll try and do some more in depth instructions if needed. inc cleaning up afterwards.