I thought I should write about my extremely negative experience with the Asus P5N-E motherboard for building a computer, because I see many people having similar problems.
As a background, I bought an Asus P5N-E mobo with a Core Duo 6850 processor and 2GB RAM. I planned to run Vista and XP in dual-boot mode since my sound card is not yet supported by Vista, and have a RAID 1 (mirror) configuration.
I bought all the components from Fry’s Electronics in Palo Alto, put them together and started installing Vista but got weird errors. This was unexpected, so I ran memtest and got a bunch of memory errors. I thought maybe the memory sticks are bad, and got errors with both sticks individually. So, I went back to Fry’s (45 minutes away) and tried a few more sticks and got errors too. It was nice of Fry’s to let me test the memory in the store itself. I was at the end of my patience but then came across a stick that did not throw errors, so I bought a pair and came back home only to realize memtest was still giving errors. That was very frustrating. So, it made me suspect the board. In hindsight, I should have tweaked the memory timings to overcome the errors but I never thought a board would need that by default; usually I have only done this to tweak and overclock a system. Tired of fighting with the board, I sent it back to Asus and, of course, had to pay shipping costs to send it to the RMA department. They sent me back another mobo which resulted in a loss of 2-3 weeks time. I hooked up the board and again got memtest errors. I decided to tweak the memory timings and viola, no more memtest errors and I was relieved.
The next step was to install Windows XP and that’s where the nightmare really began, as if the initial experience was not pretty bad already.
The RAID drivers provided by Asus seem to work ok during the installation process (where you need to hit F3 or something like to load extra drivers) but the moment XP started up after a reboot, it crashed. This seemed weird and I thought this was a Windows issue since the installation worked fine and so it had to be that the OS was buggy when it accessed the RAID. This is what even Asus tech support will tell you. In fact, they were blatant and unprofessional enough to tell me that all the blogs and discussion boards that talk about this issue are all garbage. The tech support person even asked me if I believed all the rumors in the school hall. This was downright insulting and I let it go because clearly she was an amateur and being irrational.
So, I called Microsoft support to see what they had to say about it and I was pleasantly surprised by how good they were. They apologized for the problem and walked me through a couple of possibilities. When those failed they even set up a conference call with Asus because I was being bounced back and forth and they believed it was a driver issue. The Asus support was not reachable whenever they tried with me on the line and I realized the futility of the situation.
I decided to return the board and went down to Frys; they were extremely sweet and considerate and took back the board and I ended up getting up a new Abit board. I decided to stayed away from nVidia chipsets and choose an Intel IP35 chipset instead. I brought the mobo home, hooked it up and it started up fine. I immediately loaded XP and it went through flawlessly. The board was rock solid and worked out of the box without any BIOS tweaks. Now, that’s a great product.
After some post-analysis, I think the problem my be that the XP drivers provided by nVidia have a problem and may not be fully WHL (Windows Hardware standard) compliant. So, they run fine in DOS or whatever mode the XP installer runs in but fail when XP tries to use them. I’m not really sure about what the real reason is but I was burned by the experience and will stay away from Asus and nVidia for a while, more because of terrible support.
What’s even more strange is that the Vista installation went fine, so it seems like it is only an XP issue.
Bottomline is that if you have similar problems, you can waste a lot of time trying to slipstream the XP installable or copy over all kinds of drivers to the drivers floppy disk but it most probably will not work. Now, although there are people who claim it worked for them, you should be prepared to return the board. Hope my sob story helped you!
January 21, 2008 at 6:42 am
I had exactly the same problem in the UK. XP Pro installation failed 25 times. Different memory altered the point where the failure occurred. Worse is that the vendors of the hardware insisted there were no problems when they tested – which I do not believe – I think they did not try to set up the mirrored RAID. Finally, the threat of legal action secured a refund and an Asus Commando was bought instead – works perfectly. Also, a call to Asus in the USA resulted in deep frustration – contemptuous sounding technician – I ended the call as it was a total waste of time.
January 26, 2008 at 2:08 pm
I’ve just got a new system with an Asus P5N-E SLi board — am just about to remove the RAID 0 and return it to 2 x 500GB drives and then reinstall XP on it. I do hope I don’t encounter the problems you have.
You said “RAID 0 (mirror) configuration” — I thought mirroring was RAID 1, and RAID 0 was striping.
Gareth
January 26, 2008 at 9:46 pm
Yes Gareth, you’re right; I meant RAID 1 (edited my post). Hopefully, you don’t have any problems. Good luck.
February 10, 2008 at 4:26 pm
My problems with installing RAID drivers om my P5K-E MOBO during XP installation are different.
Every time i try to load the RAID drivers from floppy (after pressing F6) i get the errormessage “iastor.msg file corrupt”. It looks a problem with the floppydrive, but has nothing to do with that drive…..
February 28, 2008 at 2:27 am
Im having problems right now with an Asus p5b deluxe. When i try to install my new 500gb hdds in a raid, everything dies. I get BSOD on xp install and if i try to boot on my old hdd with the raid drives plugged in it just simply reboots itself in the middle of splashscreen (both xp and vista). At my wits end here and i cant find an answer anywhere 😦
April 14, 2008 at 3:06 am
Well I had the exact same problem, but I did solve the problem and get my machine running Windows XP. Clearly something is wrong with the official drivers from NVIDIA and ASUS for installing Windows XP on this mobo. I tried them all and they all failed the same way.
The solution for me was to go to the vendor site for my machine (Velocity Micro). There you can find drivers specifically for the ‘F6 Raid’ install, and using those drivers I *DID* get everything working.
If you want to try the same drivers, you can get them here:
http://support.velocitymicro.com/ics/support/DLRedirect.asp?fileID=59044
Obviously Velocity Micro had the same problem with the normal drivers, so they fixed it and make a disk of their own drivers that actually *WORK*. I wonder what ASUS has to say about that?
August 25, 2008 at 5:35 pm
I also experienced problems with P5NE-SLI. In my case the XP setup program fails to finish copying its installation files to a Raid 0 array consisting of two WD 3200 Raid edition (considered as “healthy”). I tried about 20 times to install XP – the copy process hangs each time in a different location. If it succeeds, I receive a blue screen while XP tries to boot. I´ve read quite a lot about similar issues yet and was hoping that the above mentioned driver (velocity micro) could help – but it doesn´t. (btw.: it has the same version number as the one I got from ASUS support)
If I install XP on a single drive it works fine. As I bought the WD drives in purpose to set up a Raid 0 array – and want to stay with XP, I am still looking for a solution. (Vista Ultimate works perfectly with the same array, XP refuses to install on – and it doesn´t ask for drivers)
I´d be glad to find some help….
thx
August 30, 2008 at 11:06 pm
Hello Everybody
Just wanted to share my new experience.
If your system denies to start due to an error corresponding to lost HAL.DLL, invalid Boot.ini or any other important system boot files you can fix this by using the XP installation CD. Simply boot from your XP Setup CD and enter the Recovery Console. Then launch “attrib -H -R -S” on the C:\Boot.ini file and remove it. Launch “Bootcfg /Rebuild” and then Fixboot
Regards,
Carl
December 17, 2008 at 5:39 pm
Had the same problem with the Asus P5N73-AM same chipset, the drivers dont work.
June 18, 2009 at 11:36 pm
I might have the solution for some. Look for a setting in the bios called “cpu threshold margin”
By default it’s set to “optimal”.
Change it to “hi performance”.
Had the same problems with p5q-e board and 2003 sbs. That one setting got rid of the BSOD on install.
Hope that helps.
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