P5N-E problems

D3lirious · 24 Feb 2007 at 21:35

After much swearing, I've put together all the parts I've just bought.

First of all, XP crashes during install if I have all 4gb installed, but not with 2gb. I'm running the 0401 BIOS.

Second, after setting up raid0 on two 74gb raptors, it installed OK but after restarting after installing nforce drivers, it froze during boot. The only way to continue was to remove the RAID and install XP again.

Any ideas?

mishima · 25 Feb 2007 at 00:51

I pressume your talking about 4GB of RAM? What is it?

D3lirious · 25 Feb 2007 at 01:04

oops, yep some specs might help

Corsair 620W
Asus P5N-E SLI
E6600
2 sets of: OCZ 2GB (2 x 1GB) PC2-6400 Dual Channel Platinum Revision 2 XTC Series DDR2
2x74gb raptors (currently not in raid as this failed, but i'm about to try it again)
1x400gb seagate 7200.10

everything is at stock/auto in BIOS (0401).

At first, running all 4gb, the windows install would always fail when 'detecting devices' and removing 2gb stopped this from occuring. the RAID problem is a second problem i'm having. I set up raid0, used a floppy with the nforce RAID drivers and managed to install XP (MCE) fine. One of the first things I did was to install nforce network drivers from the CD to get internet working, but upon reboot, the xp splash screen would appear, followed by a black screen and nothing. So since then I've installed XP on one of the raptors (non RAID) and it seens to be running OK. I've run a 3Dmark once through.

So now I'm on 2gb ram and non raid, and all seems to be working. But not sure which problem I should try to solve first, or if they are related. I'm about to try RAID for a second time.

jackassuk56 · 25 Feb 2007 at 01:14

have you tried both sets of ram seperatly???

could be a dodgey stick even though its new.

have you tried the two working sticks in the other slots??

sorry i dont know about raid, i should realy look up how to use it but eh i will when i need to use raid

jackassuk56

Trigger · 25 Feb 2007 at 08:56

jackassuk56 said:
have you tried both sets of ram seperatly???

could be a dodgey stick even though its new.

have you tried the two working sticks in the other slots??

sorry i dont know about raid, i should realy look up how to use it but eh i will when i need to use raid

jackassuk56

It's nothing to do with faulty RAM- if he reads the manual, he might find out why

Have a look around page 1-17

Dunno about the RAID problem though sorry

jackassuk56 · 25 Feb 2007 at 10:44

- due to chipset resource allocation, the system may detect less than 8GB
system memory when you installed four 2GB DDR 2 memory modules.
- If you install four 1GB memory modules, the system may only recognise
less that 3gb because the address space is reserved for other critical
functions. this limitation appears on windows xp 32-bit operation
system which does not support Physical Address Extension (PAE).
-if you install windows xp 32-bit os, a total memory of less than 3GB
is recomended

thats what i got from the manual,

all i can understand is that windows xp 32-bit wont recognise more than 3gb of ram.

i was going to get this mobo and i think i still will because it looks like its a good board apart from the raid problem

hope this helps
jackassuk56

D3lirious · 25 Feb 2007 at 12:17

I'm expecting windows to report less that than 4gb, that much I know. But it shouldn't crash the installation! Reading around different forums, some people are having major issues with this board and certain memory configurations.

I will run 2gb for a while and see if any new BIOS updates appear. My RAID array appears to be OK this time, I must have done something odd when installing nforce drivers the first time.