ASUS Maximus Formula SE

[devilhood]

Hi

I seem to have a problem that I haven't had before, if I use the F6 floppy new or old drivers it fails trying to install and blue screens so I have tried to make a N lite with the drivers built in and it does the same, it goes by installing the Raid drivers then fails totally with the blue screen.

I just try it again as I get time, the strange bit is that on every motherboard I have had for the last 4 years I have successfully installed and run Raid.

Surely nothing could be wrong with the motherboard that would cause this is there?

Ok, perhaps I was a little hasty, but it is true that the new Intel Matrix Storage Drivers helped things a little. It is almost perfect, but I'm actually still experiencing iaStor timeouts with my Seagate 160 GB (x2) RAID-0 setup. Well, to be more specific, the HD LED stays on and the system becomes completely unresponsive.
This is a complete pain in the a$$.

All my HD's are SATA-II and fairly new, my TSSTcorp SH-S128D DVD-RW had an old firmware on it which I just upgraded, but that didn't seem to help; I have done some research on the web and have learnt that this issue can be linked to a conflict with DVD drives as well as USB devices. Perhaps the JMicron Controller cannot properly co-exist with the ICH9R controller. It might also have something to do with the fact that Intel are encouraging people to use SATA DVD-RW's instead of IDE.

Both my DVD-RW drives have the same Power state mappings, and all my HD's are the same too with the exception of S1 -> D3 (Sleep state and Device state) being specified for IDE drives and S1 -> D1 being specified for SATA drives.
I really want to be able to re-create this timeout problem whenever I can to actually test if certain conditions fix it...

Lavalys Everest reported that all my HD's have the same ATA feature set as each-other, so there is no significant difference between any of the drives other than 4 of them being Seagate and 1 being Samsung. The Samsung drive does have Automatic Acoustic Management and DMA Setup Auto-Activate though(?), both of which aren't present in Seagate drives.

I tried the iaStor(v) registry fix at The Flying Nerd by deleting the Parameters section, but that didn't seem to help.
Apparently the problem is supposed to go away if you disable the new functions of SATA-II, so unless the RAID Boot ROM is setting LPM information automatically, or there is a device conflict, the registry fix should have actually worked.

Is it really linked to LPM? is it a compliancy issue? who knows.
I suppose we can always hope that the next BIOS update will contain a new revision of the ICH9R controller BIOS.

I'm going to send an e-mail to Seagate to find out if they are aware of any firmware/Vista incompatibilities.