Neo4 Platinum - Booting 2 SATA 3.0 drives in RAID 0

I know I'm new to this forum, but I've actually been searching for hours on this subject just today hehe.
Anyway, from what the manual is saying for the K8N Neo4 Platinum motherboard, you have to use the Silicon RAID controller in order to create a bootable RAID array. Is this true?
If not, then is it possible to create a bootable RAID array using the nvRAID controller?
The reason I ask is I would like to take advantage of the new SATA 3.0 drives. Obviously, according to the manual, the Silicon controller only supports SATA 1.5 speeds. It would be pointless to purchase SATA 3.0 drives if I was forced to use the Silicon controller for RAID booting, because the overall speeds would be reduced as if they were 1.5 drives.
So, can I create a bootable RAID array using the nvRAID controller and will the drives be recognized properly as SATA 3.0?
Thanks for you help. I hope it's not too much of a bother.

Thedog,
Sorry, to bring bad new, with K8N Neo4 Platinum motherboard you have to define what the features of a SATA II drive has before you say that you can create and use a RAID 0 array on the nVidia nForce4 Chipset. If the SATA II drive has both 3Gb/s speed and NCQ the current drivers list on MSI Download page, unless they upgrade them today, will not produce a functional RAID 0 Bootable Array.
Many have said that they had SATA II RAID Arrays running on the Noe4 motherboard, but each when they sent me their drive part number provide not be to SATA V2.5 drives, that’s the latest version with all the new features. SATA II with 3Gb/s speed and no NCQ will work fine.
I have been working with MSI Support for over a month now, testing pre-beta BIOS and Pre-Beta Drives. Both the BIOS and RAID Controller drives have problem. The BIOS V1.B and a yet unreleased pre-beta drive will get you a functional RAID 0 running Windows XP Pro 32-bit Edition. There is no driver for Win XP PRO 64 Edition.
If you are, bond and determined the use the newest SATA II that include all the new features. I have a copy of the pre-beta 32-bit Windows RAID drivers MSI sent me for testing, that I will send you, just send me a Personal Message with you E-mail address in it and I will send the drives zip file to you.
I will more than likely get more people saying they have SATA II RAID Arrays running, but there is not one, I have not been able to prove wrong. ASUS and MSI have the same problems and to date both have failed to produce, because the problem I nVidia’s problem.
Roger

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Neo4 Platinum Boot CD ERROR HELP

First post!
I have had my MSI (7125) for over a year and I can't get most boot CD's to work properly. I can get them to boot but not load whatever it is I choose in there given options. Example: I can't get anything to load in Hiren's BootCD ver. 7/8. Say if I choose the Mini Win98, it just sends back errors, invalid drive letter.
I think i know the problem but can't figure out a solution. The mobo can't create a RAM drive and read from it. Maybe some kind of lock on it? I have looked around on many forums, and in some of the sticky's on here.
The weird thing is that I bought another one of these boards, a few days ago and it does the same exact thing.
I can load default BIOS settings, I tried the Boot OS/2 option in the BIOS. Some Linux distros do work. I need old school boot disks. The CD works perfect on my HP ZD8215US Laptop (Intel P4 2.8)
Specs:
MSI (7125) Neo4 Platinum
BIOS: 1B0 (on both mobos) came stock on the new one
AMD64 3200+ Venice
2 Gigs of RAM (4x 512MB's) 2 different sets
420 or 480 PSU can't remember which
Maxtor DiamondMax 10 300 Gig S-ATA
Creative X-FI Platinum
Logitech LX700 Cordless keyboard only USB plugged in (for both keyboard/mouse)
NO USB devices plugged in besides keyboard/mouse
...I have a LOT more hardware but its just the HD, floppy & two DVD burners that I have connected for the new mobo so far.
I haven't tried Murdok's 1C7 BIOS yet. I even tried disabling all of my IDE/SATA controllers and still no go.
I mean...I have stripped it down with less components connected. Could only be the mobo/ram/dvd

Thanks for the reply.
I disabled almost every setting in the BIOS, especially everything in the Integrated screen except only for the ATA controller I was using. I tried a different ATA cable (both round). I took out the other 3 sticks of memory so just 1x 512 MB DDR. I took the DVD burner out and stuck it in my g/f's computer, Gigabyte nForce 2 AlthonXP 3200+ and it works perfect booting into the BootCD with the same options selected.
But looking at the errors, it just looks like it can't read the ram drive.
I'm getting an adapter for my IDE HDD's that converts them into S-ATA tomorrow, so i'll took one of the adapters up to the DVD burners and see if that sheds any light on this problem.
With this board I only have 2 ATA connectors, tried both.
Maybe its an 64-bit issue. I tried the UBCD 3.4 and that one worked on a few things.
Maybe I can play around with the ramdisk creator program and see if there isn't some settings then figure out the problem with the Hiren guy. I haven't heard either way if this BootCD will work with Nforce 4 Ultra and the MSI 7125 Neo4 Platinum.

K8N Neo4 Platinum & Seagate 750GB SATA-II?

I bought a Maxtor 500gb SATA-II drive a few months ago and found it didn't work with my Neo4 platinum.
A few months down the line, the new 750GB seagate drives have caught my eye. Have the issues with this board and SATA-II drives been resolved?

markwm, Yes and No. Yes they have worked out the problems with Seagate SATA II [at least from my own experience] but there still could be drives on the shelf that need firmware upgrades. Seagate have got there act together now and will supply the firmware if required after you contact there tech support. Seeing as how the 750 GB is newer than my drives chances are it's ok right out of the box.

K8n neo4 platinum sees my sata drive as ide

I have a western digital 80gb sata drive. I connected it to sata3 on my motherboard but bios says it's fifth ide primary. Is that normal? Because in some other board's bioses i saw it's shown as sata. I have bios v1.1 by the way.
And also in windows, there's an icon same as the icon which appears when a usb device is connected to the computer. When I right click, I see my hdd on the safely removable devices list. I'm using windows server 2003 enterprise edition and yes I have installed the sata driver by pressing f6 during the windows setup. Does this icon appears in everyone?

you will get the icon with sata drives as in theory they are hot pluggable
of course in practise if its your c drive you cannot touch it
but a server with raid 5 or 10 you can swap out drives on the fly

IMac won't boot with SATA external firewire drive attached

I have an 1T Hitachi SATA drive enclosed in a Macally firewire enclosure. If it is attached either in series with other IDE firewire drives or directly, my iMac will boot only to the Apple icon and will not engage the gear icon. If I disconnect the drive the iMac will boot normally with all the other IDE firewire drives attached. I've troubleshot with both Macally and Hitachi, received a replacement enclosure and have an RMA from Hitachi. Before I send the Hitachi back with the possibility of a replacement not fixing the problem, I am asking whether there is a known problem with external SATA drives in particular. TIA. -Dave

I have the same problem exactly but with two firewire 800 drives attached. Both are LaCie d2 500 gb drives. I have tried each one as the first in the series with no luck. I have not tried to connect with any other type of cable.

K8N Neo4 Platinum boots only with CMOS reset

This is my first build (and perhaps my last). The system ran without error for two weeks but the BIOS recognized only 2.88 GB rather than the 4 GB which are in the DIMM slots. I removed the power cord, put on an anti-static strap and reseated two of the 1 GB sticks. Since that time it will not boot without a CMOS reset. (But the BIOS recognizes 3.9 GB on most of my boots. On my last one, it was back to 2.88 GB).
Here's my booting process:
Remove power cord and switch PSU off.
Put on wrist strap and depress CMOS reset button on board for ten seconds.
Insert power cord and switch PSU on.
At this point the system boots normally without my depressing the normal power switch at the front of the case! And it runs without error once it boots.
I can reboot the system from the operating system without problems. When I shutdown (power off), depressing the normal power switch has no effect and I have to boot with the CMOS reset process above.
Memtest86 shows no memory errors. A similar thread with Neo2's suggested setting ht = 4x but that didn't help in my case. I also let the BIOS load optimized defaults but that didn't fix things either. I'm open to whatever suggestions you can make! (If my signature with my system configuration doesn't appear, I'll post it in a followup.)

Quote from: blazing storm on 03-June-05, 05:52:21
Looks like a Memory/Motherboard problem but I've never heard of it before or a low powered power supply could stop it recognising the 4GB so may be worth borrowing a more powerful one to test and see.. all out of ideas on this now
You were right. I borrowed a Rosewill RE501-BLK 3.3v@28a, 5v@30a, 12v@34a, 500W and now I don't have to reset the CMOS to boot! The case power switch still doesn't work--I have to turn off the PSU and turn it on again to boot--but others in this thread have suggested improper wiring of the switch which I'll check out. But I certainly can live with this since the PSU power switch is at least external to the case (as opposed to the CMOS reset switch). Now I'll go to the PSU thread to pick out a new PSU.
The BIOS on repeated boots recognizes the memory as about 3.7 GB (and Linux at about 3.4 GB, but I suppose that there are "good" reasons that OS's give a different number than BIOS's) and I can live with that, also, since, in an earlier post in this thread, I quoted MSI's "warning" that I could only expect 3+ GB to be recognized by the BIOS if I filled all 4 DIMMs with 1 GB sticks. But I think my 1.52beta MS-7125 BIOS also contributed to this increase. (My v. 1.3 BIOS recognized only 2.88 GB.)
I'm happy and thank all who contributed suggestions to this thread. Now I need to configure the software, a task that I know at least something about.

K8N Neo Platinum nf3 250Gb SATA RAID question?

Hi all I'm ready to make the move to an AMD A64 setup from my currnet P4.
You all know what a tough job it is to find the right motherboard for an A64
After much research I think the K8N Neo Platinum is the board for me, but there's one question I can't find an answer too. So I'm turning to this forum. Thanks much for any help.
I currently run a dual RAID"0" setup. Two WD360 Raptors as boot array off the Si3114 on-board controller and two WD740 Raptors as a game \ power apps storage array off the ICH5R southbridge.
My question is; Is it possible to run this drive setup off the K8N Neo Platinum's 4 SATA controllers? Two seperate RAID"0" arrays with one bootable.
thank you-Mike

I decided to go with a S939 instead....I know me...and I'll want one as soon as I got the S754 up & running
I ordered a K8T NEO2-FIR...Its got the on-board Promise SATA RAID controller + on chip VIA RAID...so it should suit my drive needs perfectly

New Drives - boot Neo4 Platinum from SATA II?

I am going to re-configure my AMD 64 3200+ K8N Neo4 Platinum mobo to have 2 Hitachi T7K250 SATA II hard drives (currently PC has a single IDE drive that will be removed). I have XP PRO original as well as SP2 on a separate disc. Can anyone suggest a course of action here? Any experience with booting from SATA II? I guess I could leave the IDE drive in place simply to hold the OS and put the 2 SATA II drives in for data.

Quote from: Kaplan on 28-June-05, 01:30:10
Those drives "will be" SATA I until you download an utility from the Hitachi website. So they have to be manually configured to be SATA II.
OIC, I am running a T7K250 250GB Sata II Hiitachi as boot drive now. Hardware manager show it is set at Sata I 1.5
If I manually configured it with the Hitachi utility,i.e. boot from DOS as instructed in the website;
Hitachi web site does not say it must be configure before fresh installation of OS or it can be configure when OS is already installed on the drive;
Neither does Hitachi say any thing about configuring a OS installed drive.
Any effect with my installed Windows XP Pro on the HDD?
Willl it be able to boot again? Please help & advise, thanks!!!
By the way I am using MSI K8N Platinum SLi mobo.

K8N Neo4 Platinum, how to move MBR to sata (make it drive #1)?

I am not sure I am phrasing the question correctly, so bear with me. I have a K8N Neo4 platinum with the SiI3114 controller and sata ports 4-8 (I believe its what they are calling PCB 1.x) with bios v1.D. I moved the board to another box and installed winXP on it. I was running it with IDE hard drives. Everything was working great but the OS was running really slow so I bought a SATA 300 mb/s drive and pluged it into SATA1 (I read about using ports 3 and 4 for raid but I do not want to use the NVraid at all, it is disabled). Then I proceeded to reinstall win XP. In the setup, I deleted the original C partiton and created one on the sata drive and rebooted so that there would be no "C" drive confusion by the winxp setup (have had that problem before and this keeps it from happening). Went through the setup and the sata was correctly reported as "C". Told windows to install itself there but it told me that it needed to write to MBR on the old c drive but that, since I had deleted the partiton, it couldn't and had to format it. So I knew that something was wrong.
So I rebooted and disabled the ide bus that contained the old IDE drive and just left the CD ide bus enabled. WinXP installed fine with no complaints. Then it rebooted and I re-enabled the ide bus in the bios. It wouldn't boot into the partiton I just installed winxp on! To get it to boot, I had to use F11 (the bios boot menu) and select the sata drive. Went through the whole setup winXP thing and rebooted. Same problem, it wouldn't boot the sata drive. :(
As long as that ide bus with the old ide drive is enabled, it won't boot the sata drive! I have rearranged the boot order on the bios every way possible. I opened up the box and moved that ide chain with the old ide drive to the ide2 port and put the dvd drive on ide1. I made the old drive slave and the prior slave master. That didn't fix it either. How do I tell this motherboard that the 1st drive is the sata drive? How do I tell it the MBR should be there not on the old ide drive? How do I fix this? Thanks!

Thank you for your replies! Hans, thank you I will give it a go again doing full formats all the way. I usually use the full format when installing winXP but I did things in a different order than you instructed so I will definately try it.
Aicjofs, thank you, There are 3 hard drives in this system currently. There is the ide hard drive that used to be the "c" drive (a western digital 160gb ata133 7200rpm 8mb cache) and a second ide hard drive that is an extended partition with 1 logical drive with data on it (western digital 300gb ata133 7200rpm 8mb cache). Then there is a sata hard drive in sata1 port with 2 partitions one primary and one extended. The extended partion does have data on it as I moved stuff there after I got winXP up the 2nd time (western digital 250gb sata II 7200rpm 16mg cache). Right now, I have the ide drive with data on it as ide2 master and the old "c" drive as ide2 slave and it is unformatted and contains no partion information (I deleted the partition after I installed the SATA drive and installed winXP). XP won't boot. What happens is that, if I take the winxp cd out, it gives me a "no system" error. If I leave the WinXP cd in it boots that disk. However, if I use "f11" and choose to boot the sata drive, winxp comes up just fine. If I disable the ide bus with the two ide hard drives, it boots winxp just fine.
Edit: bios is v1.D. It feels like this mobo is telling windows setup that the master ide drive is the first disk and to ignore everything else. It feels like if I can just tell the mobo that the sata drive is the first disk then everything will work . It is late night where I am now, and I've been fighting with this since the afternoon so I might have to goto sleep but I will be back at it tomorrow and will go though what Hans instructed. If anyone has any otehr ideas, I'd really appreciate that as well.

SATA drives not being detected - K8N Neo4 Platinum

I have the same problem, different PSU!
msi k8n neo4 platinum pcb 1.0
3000 64 939
corsair 1gb dual channel ddr400
nvidia 8800gts
antec truepower 550 (19a @ 12v)
used to run 2 ide maxtor 120 and 80
added in a sata dvd writer, worked for 6 months
added in a sata 1TB seagate 7200, sata fails a majority of the time
same symptons now persist as in original post.
:< either bios detects both sata drives, neither, or it crashes. this happens respectively rarely, uncommon, and most common
what ive tried:
updated all mainboard, bios, video drivers to the most up to date (i had to in order for bios to detect the full size of the 1TB)
no ide, same problems
only 1 sata, with and without ide, same problems
the sata only works after a long period of time (or randomly), that i dont use it
(ive had both sata unplugged for 12 hours, booted up this morning with them and it detected, i selected safe mode boot, after making it through a majority of the load, it crashed)
testing a new psu in a day or so, much more powerful. ill give you all my results.

The cables aren't overly bent?
"...worked for 6 months"
"...fails a majority of the time"
Not very relevant, but since i found the FAQs, and there are no less than four FAQs for hard disks http://global.msi.com.tw/index.php?func=prodfaq&maincat_no=1&cat2_no=&cat3_no=&prod_no=165#menu :
"Silicon Image Si3114R Raid bios doesn't have JBOD setting in it, why?
In the new Silicon Image BIOS, JBOD already been renamed as "Concatenation".
If you want to use single SATA HDD or when tou want use each SATA HDD as IDE mode, you can choose "Concatenation" function in Silicon RAID BIOS."
"I am using a SATA hard drive with NCQ technology on this motherboard and I am experiencing problems. How do I fix it?
The issue depends on the Southbridge chipset. Nvidia is currently working on an updated nForce driver to address the issues with certain hard drives.
You could contact Nvidia support to ask for the new driver if there is one. If there is not any new driver to solve the issue, please disable NCQ on your system." /My fattening. /

XP64bit installation halts, K8N Neo4 Platinum - No SATA drives found?

My setup:
Athlon 64 3500+
K8N Neo4 Platinum
2GB OCZ 3200 Premier
2) WD Sata 80GB HD's (for RAID 0)
Nvidia 6800GT Extreme VGA
I was recently lucky enough to get my hands on a real Windows XP Pro64bit Extended Edition. I gathered quite a few 64bit drivers which claim to do the job (so they say.)
However I ran into a very strange issue during installation.
My main concern was getting RAID drivers to utilize after pressing F6 during the Windows install. Unfortunately I could not find Nvidia drivers so I went with the Silicon Image Sil3114 64bit drivers I got from their website. Copied them to a disk and thought I was ready to rock N roll. I have updated all BIOS to latest versions as of the date of this post.
Now I went into the RAID BIOS and setup my RAID 0 Array and both SATA drives are shown. All went well in this dept.
I began my installtion of XP64 and pressed F6 to install the RAID drivers. Popped the floppy in and the driver files were copied successfully.
I continued on to the point where you are prompted to setup Windows XP and it searches for any previous installs.
I continue to where I should get the dislmaimer and to press F8, however the install halts and say no hard drives were found. Setup cannot continue.
Any ideas as to why my drives are not being detected during installation? They show up fine under the RAID setup BIOS.
Any info or thoughts is truly appreciated.

You need to make your own floppy for the nvidia 64 ide drivers.
How to install Windows on SATA using F6 to load Drivers
Follow item 1 Obviously usinfg the Neo4 64bit unified driver pack Windows XP Professional x64 Edition
luck

Largest SATA drive for K8N Neo4 Platinum

I have a system based on the K8N Neo4 Platinum board, I'm planning to up, the storage capacity of my rig and was wondering if I can install a 500 GB or larger SATA or SATA II drive on it?
to make long story short I would like to know whats the largest Hard Drive (either IDE or SATA) one can install on a system with this board without problems or compatibility issues.
I presently have a Maxtor Diamond Plus 80GB SATA drive,
Any takers??? ???

I see no problems, just try it.
As for a Sata-II drive, don't take Maxtor, any other drive should be fine.
However, you maybe must jumper it to SATA-1, depends on the onboard controller.

Please Help K8N Neo4 Platinum won't boot?

Hello,
I could use your expertise in this matter. I have built several systems and never seen this before. My system will not boot with the hard drive
and/or DVD drive attached. It will boot with just the 1.44 floppy attached. My system is as follows:
MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum ATX AMD Motherboard
connect3D 3038 Radeon X800GTO 256MB 256-bit GDDR3 VIVO PCI Express x16 Video Card
Rosewill RV500S-2 500W Power Supply 500W ATX 2.01
+3.3v- 30A
+5V - 45a
+12V1 - 18a
+12V2 - 16a
AMD Athlon 64 3000+ 1GHz FSB Socket 939 Processor
CORSAIR ValueSelect 1GB (2 x 512MB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM Dual Channel Kit System Memory
Cas Latency 2.5
Voltage 2.5V
Unbuffered
Windows XP professtional Service Pack 2
I tried resetting CMOS, changing the cmos battery, re-setting the video card, moving memory modules (from positions 1&2 to 3&4). The power supply is working. When I put my hard drive into another system it boots perfectly. Please help!
Thanks
Tony

All that info and I still don't know where you are plugging them in. SATA or IDE(PATA)? Both?
Can you describe the not booting a little more? i.e. No video at all, you see POST but it doesn't complete, POST completes but you can't boot an OS.

Slow Boot problem with New K8N Neo4 Platinum HELP

Hello,
I just set up my new rig, the system specs are..
amd64 3500+
K8N Neo4 Platinum PCI-E (non SLI)
2x80gb SATA (insockets 5 and 6) Silicon
2x512 ram generic
BFG 6800 Ultra OC
antec 550 truepower
The entire install went well.. It zipped through windows98... But when it tired to Boot windows98.. it went really really slow.. The animation bar at the bottom was chugging.. like lagging.. and took well over 10 minutes to fully load..
I check RAM was not it.. re-connected.. was not it.. new SATA cables.. no idea any help would do.. getting impatient and tired =O must get it up tonight!

Don't know if you or many people have seen this it's appeared over the last few days K8N Neo4 Platinum - NOTE: NVIDIA nForce 3/4 Series board DO NOT support Windows® 98/ME
There are people running 98 but my own understanding was that 98 could only use a sata drive as a data drive & could not be installed on a sata drive. Where have you installed it ???
see Win 98SE IDE problem.... Has anyone worked it out yet?
luck

New K8N Neo4 Platinum build. Help, Nforce4 driver question?

I am building a new K8N Neo4 Platinum system (see my sig). I wanted to get the latest Nforce4 drivers, before installing XP. I noticed on the Nvidia website a 5.10 Unified Driver download and a 6.66 AMD download. Which should I use? It looks like the versions in the 5.10 Unified Driver are actually older than what is in the Nforce4 drivers, from the MSI site. If I use the 6.66 AMD drivers, should I make a SATA Raid Driver floppy, from them, to use during the XP install? Any advice is appreciated.

just do it from a floppy, LiveUpdate is crap
and yes you HAVE to F6 these drivers on Windows install if you plan on using SATA or you cannot boot from SATA
unfied drivers are NOT FOR NFORCE 4. You MUST use the NF4-specific 6.66 (or earlier)
Unified Drivers are specific only to nForce 1/2/3. AMD and Intel each have specific and unique driver sets for nForce4.
download 6.66, extract and explore the folder
go to IDE->Win2K->SATARAID and copy everything in this folder to a floppy
make two floppies just to be safe
you cannot use CD, you MUST use floppy because Windows will look in a: only
as soon as Windows install starts you will see a screen that says "Press F6 to install third party SCSI or RAID driver"... hit F6 and insert floppy and after a few minutes, you will get a screen that says"
"Press S to install other drivers..."
press S
next screen comes up, first select and install "nVidida Raid class driver (required)" -->hit enter
back to "Press S to install other drivers..." screen
press S again
screen wil come up again, this time choose and install ""nVidia nforce storage controller(required)"
one more time back to "press S to instal other drivers...", this time just hit ENTER
now you're good to go

Neo4 Platinum - Booting 2 SATA 3.0 drives in RAID 0

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