Who should I be contacting to b*tch about my problem with NVIDIA RAID/SW IDE Driver

[Doug117]

So after getting some random bluescreens with STOP 0x0000009c MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION (0x00000004, 0x8086EFF0, B2000000, 00070F0F) (yes, the 4 parameters are ALWAYS the same) and searching the internet and doing some investigating on my own, I've tracked my problem to the NVIDIA RAID. Only when I'm doing some fair amount of I/O operations it decides to take a dump. As an example i was installing a game from a ISO i had on the RAID parition right onto the same RAID partition. Yes, not the most optimal way of doing things, but my point is this... every time during the install it would bluescreen. Tried it at least 5 times before I got fed up with it. Moved the ISO elsewhere and installed on my regular 60GB drive... no hitch.

I've also made the problem reproduce itself when i was working on a CD image (using cdimage.exe to combine all the Visual Studio Express editions into one CD). Same thing, a lot of reading and writing to the same drive. Blue screened all the time. Moved everything to another drive (after a few bluescreens trying to get the data off the RAID) and all worked great. Funny thing is When i first got this thing installed i moved 100GB from a backup drive to the RAID with no problem.

So, obviously the problem is the RAID. I have a A64 Venice E3 3200+ and 1GB (2x512MB) Kingston Hyper-X memory all on a EPoX 9NPA+ Ultra. Processor and RAM pass all the tests I can throw at them (Prime95, SuperPI, memtest86, etc). So it is not that problem at all. I have nForce 6.70 installed (no firewall), and my BIOS is the latest one available on the EPoX website. OS: WinXP SP2. System is running @ spec -- NO OVERCLOCK -- of course it WAS OC'd, but i brought everything back down when the problems showed up... and they're still there

Is there some techincal paper that can tell me what the parameters of the STOP error mean? From AMD since its the CPU throwing that error?

Bigger question -- who do I call/email/whatever about my problem to attempt to find a solution..... nVidia, AMD, EPoX? I dont think I'd get much help from anyone, but then again I havent tried yet. Anyone else out there with a similar situation with their computer and has gotten some help?

<edit> OK i remembered something that happened a while back that may have something to do with this problem. When i did move all that data (the 100GB) back onto my RAID from my backup drive it seemed like it was moving really slow, but I didnt check it for a few days after (HL2 was taking FOREVER to load, etc). Ran HDTach -- results were less than stellar. Well the nForce driver had my two drives set on Multi-Word DMA2.... so i cranked em up to UDMA5 and the speeds improved. I'm thinking the speed increase has something to do with this?? While the drives themselves can do UDMA5 (2xWD800BBs) maybe the chipset is detecting errors and letting the CPU know the game is over?

 

[Polish3d]

When I used driver cleaner in an attempt to clean out just the nvidia gpu drivers, I had this happen to me too, my system would not boot up, it would crash to that screen with the same error message... it could be a corrupted driver (I think in my case, a missing one.) I had to reformat as even safemod wouldnt work.

I would consider reformatting ... I used RAID also and had the same thing happen, almost surei t was the SW IDE driver

 

[Doug117]

UPDATE! -- Well, not that great of an update but I did email EPoX about this on the 26th at 6pm and I got a reply (not some automated crap either) on the 28th @ 3am (dunno what time that is in taiwan ). I had given them a pretty broad idea of what was happening so they emailed me back wanting to know some more detailed information. So that I did... of course both times I got it to bluescreen consistantly was when i was doing or using tools that are less than, how do you say... legal? M$ cdimage.exe to make a cdimage. And installing a game from a dvd image So i need to find something easy for them to duplicate the problem on their end. Any Ideas? Its gotta be something pretty hardcore with a lot of seeking/reading/writing (copying 5GB to my RAID across the network doesnt bluescreen at all). I'm gonna go test some things now, but lemme know some ideas!

 

[dclive]

Originally posted by: Doug117
UPDATE! -- Well, not that great of an update but I did email EPoX about this on the 26th at 6pm and I got a reply (not some automated crap either) on the 28th @ 3am (dunno what time that is in taiwan ). I had given them a pretty broad idea of what was happening so they emailed me back wanting to know some more detailed information. So that I did... of course both times I got it to bluescreen consistantly was when i was doing or using tools that are less than, how do you say... legal? M$ cdimage.exe to make a cdimage. And installing a game from a dvd image So i need to find something easy for them to duplicate the problem on their end. Any Ideas? Its gotta be something pretty hardcore with a lot of seeking/reading/writing (copying 5GB to my RAID across the network doesnt bluescreen at all). I'm gonna go test some things now, but lemme know some ideas!

Run MPS Reports and send me the resulting computername.cab file, and send me, zipped up, the contents of c:\windows\minidumps. I'll take a look and see if I can see what's causing the dumps.

 

[Zenbeatnik]

I had a similar problem with that same NVIDIA SW IDE driver. At first I couldn't figure out what was causing random bluescreens with STOP 0x0000009c MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION... until I tried uninstalling that SW IDE driver. Anyway the problem stopped after the driver was eradicated.

 

[nweaver]

I had a promise HW raid controller card w/raid 5+1 (not OS partition). I was running 2k3 server, and after a windows update, it started grinding the computer to a halt (took 20+ minutes to log in if someone had accessed a file on the array) and then blue screening. Moved the card to my XP Pro box, and it worked fine (H/W is good, so I would think) while I rebuilt the OS on the server. Installed 2k3 (prior to SP1) and then moved the raid array back over (needed to have more open connections then XP could handle) and it was fine. I (like an idiot) had auto updates turned on (Great tool for end user boxes, horrible tool for servers) and it got a patch that started the whole cycle over again. Migrated the machine to a fully patched 2K Server, and no problems.

Could be an update you got. Promise support was horrible. "Scan all the drives hooked to another controller with the manufacturers utility, and do a low level format". Yeah, wipe 800 Gigs of data (it WAS backed up on DLT) and waste multiple days to do that, when it was an OS patch (you would think they would figure this out quick).

I also got to point a finger at a bean counter, who went IDE Raid instead of SCSI (It's cheaper) or a fibre array (that we could have run multiple servers on). It took several hours to rebuild the array every time it hiccuped. We more then lost our savings in time. Moral of the story: Enterprise Hardware for Enterprise usage. I liked the card, it worked pretty well, but the downtime (that would have been acceptable for home use) was not acceptable. We got a fibre storage box about 3 weeks later (and run nightly backups to it, as well as tape backups) so if it goes offline again....

 

[Doug117]

Originally posted by: dclive

Originally posted by: Doug117
UPDATE! -- Well, not that great of an update but I did email EPoX about this on the 26th at 6pm and I got a reply (not some automated crap either) on the 28th @ 3am (dunno what time that is in taiwan ). I had given them a pretty broad idea of what was happening so they emailed me back wanting to know some more detailed information. So that I did... of course both times I got it to bluescreen consistantly was when i was doing or using tools that are less than, how do you say... legal? M$ cdimage.exe to make a cdimage. And installing a game from a dvd image So i need to find something easy for them to duplicate the problem on their end. Any Ideas? Its gotta be something pretty hardcore with a lot of seeking/reading/writing (copying 5GB to my RAID across the network doesnt bluescreen at all). I'm gonna go test some things now, but lemme know some ideas!

Run MPS Reports and send me the resulting computername.cab file, and send me, zipped up, the contents of c:\windows\minidumps. I'll take a look and see if I can see what's causing the dumps.

Ooh i like that MPSReports thing. As for the dumps i've gone thru them with WinDbg. The consensus is while the nVidia Driver seems to be the problem, it doesnt show up in the dumpcheck. I'm a bit hesitant sending THAT much information about my computer (containing god knows what about me) If you want the dumps, though, browse on over to http://www.msdossys.com/minidumps. I've got all of em up there... some not 9c, which were due to other errors since fixed

 

[dclive]

True - the dump seems to point to the CPU. Interesting.

 

[Doug117]

Yeah its almost like the CPU causes the MCE on itself... but then again i dont know if all MCEs work like that...

 

[Doug117]

Ooh just got another email -- "Dear Sir
Please use our board support driver CD for board's chipset driver install or download from our website nForce v6.53 NV chipset driver for your issue check."
Downgrade, eh?? Suppose its worth a try!

 

[Doug117]

Well that didnt work.. and I told em... and got another email:" Please try to remove the nforce driver about the IDE SW deriver and let IDE driver get from Microsoft Windows XP support. Please try to do it for your issue check and let me know the result." Wow... um, yeah for RAID to work, I kinda need the IDE driver, yes? /me starts to wonder about support @ epox....

 

[WebDude]

Originally posted by: Doug117
Wow... um, yeah for RAID to work, I kinda need the IDE driver, yes? /me starts to wonder about support @ epox....

Acutally no. The IDE and RAID drivers are separate. What the email is trying to tell you (in bad English of course) is to unload the NV SW drivers, These drivers are part of the nv chipset driver package, and they replace the standard MS IDE drivers. Supposedly they give you better performance than the MS drivers. When you do an original install of the nv drivers, there's a checklist on the drivers you want to install, and you can uncheck the box for the SW drivers. Since you've already installed them, you'll have to go to add/remove programs to get rid of them.

I remember some posts somewhere about these SW drivers causing problems. Not sure if the performance benefit they offer is all that great anyway. Nor am I sure if removing them will help your problem. But I guess it's worth a try.

 

[Doug117]

Ok then, what should I install from the nForce drivers? It specifically states in the installation:

NVIDIA IDE SW Driver Information
---------------------------------
The NVIDIA IDE SW driver replaces the ATA drivers (that come with Windows)
with drivers that are optimized for nForce2/nForce3/nForce4-based desktop computers.

The NVIDIA IDE SW driver reduces the storage sub-system bottleneck, enabling
the processor and other system level hardware to be more productive and
efficient.

Installation of the NVIDIA IDE SW Driver is required to enable the NVIDIA RAID
solution. If you are installing NVIDIA RAID into a NEW Windows Operating
System, a floppy disk with the NVIDIA IDE Drivers must be created to enable
installation of NVIDIA RAID.

In most cases, the NVIDIA IDE SW driver is not a requirement for your operating
system to work properly.

So, please, inform me of how I can get around this....

 

[WebDude]

Well that quote from Nvidia is confusing to me. This is some background on the issue of the SW/IDE drivers:

Link

If you can't just uninstall the SW IDE drivers, then I would uninstall the entire nf4 driver package, and then do a reinstall of it, making sure the box in front of "NVIDIA IDE driver" was not checked.

By the way, what version of the Nf4 drivers did you install, and which sata hd's to you have in your raid array?

 

[Kraptor]

Hi there! I had the same problem and downgrade solved it. It seems that nforce driver nicely screws up the whole systems. I havent treid the latest drivers(6.70), but for me only 6.53 the one that came with the board worked fine.

Try to email Epox Europe. Ive sent emails to Eopx USA, Eu and Taiwain and the best response I got was from their Eu HQ. Ah yeah and the only way to truly downgrade is to reinstall your whole system. Good luck. It took me more then a month to solve this problem.

Forgot to mention that this is a Sata/Raid problem with the nv sata controllers and nforce 6.6x drivers not with your IDE.

 

[Doug117]

I'm not using SATA at all... all PATA drives. I'm writing this from a freshly installed XP partition. I installed 6.53 without the SW IDE drivers and guess what.... NO RAID! Disk Management says my first drive it doesnt recognize is the 160GB stripe, while the next is the 80GB (disk2 of the 2 disk stripe). So obviously this does not work.

I do believe I was correct all along, you have to have the IDE drivers installed for RAID...

 

[Kraptor]

Ok, then it seems that the problem with with the Raid itself, cuase ive tried with the newest 6.70 nforce driver and got the problem again, so back to the old drivers.

 

[Kraptor]

If you using 6.53 then u have to install those SW drives too.

You have to copy all the files from this directory to use PATA Raid:

C:\NVIDIA\nForceWin2KXP\6.xx\WINXP\IDE\WinXP\pataraid

BTW, I have contacted to Epox support all of em and got these responses:

From Epox USA:
"Dear User,
Please use the Nforce driver version that comes with the baord in the EPoX Drivers CD. We'll check into this matter. The version from Nvidia may not be fully tested yet. Thanks"

From Epox Taiwan:
"Dear Sir
The new nForce chipset driver was not pass the system compatibility test,it has issue with raid function.
Please still keep to use the version 6.53 for your system work stable.If you use this driver have issue,please let me know"

 

[Kraptor]

It seems that my problem finally got solved. I had to create a floppy with the 6.53 drivers install the OS with those then just simply install the 6.70 drivers in xp install SW drivers too and everythign seem to work ok now.

 

[Doug117]

...the saga continues...

Mmmkay heres a new one.... I've got this Promise Ultra100 TX2 PCI IDE controller card i had in my other computer that I put in here so I could have all 6 of my PATA devices plugged in... yeah well thats not working so well either. Every time i try to get the properties of the card in Device Manager -- boom, machine check exception again... same damn codes too! Related? I've emailed EPoX on this one too.... Course I need to do a reinstall of windows since....

"The RAID driver was not in Windows system install.
You must creat the RAID driver from driver CD to floppy for Windows install used.
Before Windows system install,Please check the RAID function in bios and raid bios setup .

When you install the Windows XP ,the system was setup and have show press F6, Please press F6

And wait for next step ask you ?Please insert specificity driver?.? ,Please insert the Floppy disk (RAID driver) install.
If you have do these steps ,the windows xp system install will find the RAID HD,If not ,the system can not find it.
In Windows system ,please install nForce chipset driver V6.53 for system driver install."

Yeah I dont get how installing it in text mode windows setup will be any different than doing it manually after Windows is installed, but I gotta do it so i can progress thru more emails...

 

[Doug117]

O...M...G -- replaced the rounded IDE cables that came w/ the board with some standard 80-conductor cables. No crashes....

As for the Ultra100 TX2 -- /me was an idiot thinking the drivers on their site (built in 2003) were older than the built-in XP (7/1/2001 -- I forget how old XP is sometimes )... Can burn/read/get properties of card and DVD/RW... all while copying large amounts of data on the RAID...

Will have to test the rounded cable theory later... Going to piss me off if the cables were the problem all this time and I never thought of trying regular ones.....